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Name It, and They Will Come

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Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#111

Post by jacobolus »

coldtea wrote: post #16

Even if you don't understand the point the author is trying to make, this part you should be able to understand perfectly, and I find it a perfectly accurate description of what happens 90% of the time: = = = = The top comment thread picks on the coding style in a README example. It turns into an argument about indentation with over a hundred replies and a brief history of how different programming languages approach…

But so what?

People chatting about random topics prompted by the link is the whole point of a link aggregation discussion site. The discussion is not intended to precisely meet the needs of the person who created or submitted the link, and it’s silly to dismiss it because it predictably doesn’t.

If someone wants e.g. concrete technical feedback about a new specialized tool that takes hundreds of hours of preparation to appreciate, they should find a forum consisting exclusively of people with enough background to give meaningful feedback, and then describe exactly what kind of feedback they are looking for.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#112

Post by [deleted] »

pedalpete wrote: post #69
topoftheforts wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that description I still have no idea about what you actually do. Maybe that's not actually the pitch and you're just giving an example, or maybe not, just wanted you to give you my feedback :)

Thanks, we've found this to be significantly better than what we were saying before, it's still a work in progress. "We're like drone shot video, but the viewer is in control of their perspective" Most people get that.

[deleted]

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#113

Post by danmaz74 »

swish_bob wrote: post #110
danmaz74 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you would prioritise comments from those who on average made upvoted comments?

You could (relatively) easily, implement Pagerank but use votes instead of links. This would make people who have lots of (quality) upvotes have more weight. Whether it would improve the quality of the comment sections is an interesting question. I'd be interested to see that tested somewhere ...

I think it would only help marginally, but it would be interesting to be able to experiment with something like that.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#114

Post by lkrubner »

mikekchar wrote: post #56
danmaz74 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet has always had more noise than signal. HN used to have an incredibly good noise reduction mechanism, mostly thanks to self-policing in the community and the occasional intervention of the moderators. Thanks to this mechanism, most of the time, the top comments were really interesting ones. The noise usually ended towards the bottom of the page. I'm pretty sure that the expectation that this would happen…

There once was a model railway enthusiast. He loved trains and knew just about everything about them. He had a wonderful collection of model trains. One day he met someone with the same love of model railways. Together they built complex simulations and had their trains running together. They wrote software that could schedule the trains, etc, etc. A few more people noticed and while most people said, "Wow. These guy…

Did you just write this as a comment for Hacker News? It’s very good. It also feels edited.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#115

Post by btown »

sandinmyjoints wrote: post #108
btown wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Dan (the OP) had gone into more detail on exactly what techniques one can use to tell a story, because this is exactly what he does - very well! - as one of the most prolific voices in the React (and perhaps all of frontend) community. My personal take: (1) Marketing shouldn't be an afterthought; it must be considered in the same way one would write code. Take a page from the folks who designed a custom websit…

> To put it another way, think of "things that would distract someone from the main message" as "bugs" in your code. This is the PR/communications industry. Once I understood this, and that a main message is one sentence at most -- a short phrase is even better -- interviews of people in politics made a lot more sense!

Yep, the same way we write code and think “what are the implications of this function were called from a weird context,” so too do PR/communications folks “engineer” statements.

Re: Name It, and They Will Come

#116

Post by cben »

ValleyOfTheMtns wrote: post #70
coldtea wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I honestly don't understand what this post is trying to say. It says that most users wont try hard enough to understand a post, and instead comment like people are doing in this thread. (It also suggests to try and give name to what you've built, and and try and weave it into an explicit narrative, to help people understand it and give more focused responses).

So he should've named the naming problem. Wait, is that what it's called? The Naming Problem?

I think "Name it and they will come" is now a pretty good quotable name for the Naming / storytelling Solution.
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