Live data from Hacker News

Please read the paper before you comment

buttondown.email

241–250 of 341 posts

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a standard quality measurement tactic in Internet based surveys. In the list of survey questions, you post a few question which have clear black or white answers. The answers from the survey takers will let you know to further investigate the the survey response. You can then decide to take actions accordingly. Most of the times, you discard.

Google had a surveys program where you could earn credits for the google play store and every now and then you would get a trap question usually formatted something like "Have you used x product" or "how well do you know x" where x does not exist. Anyone who answers incorrectly will see limited surveys in the future.

> Google had a surveys program where you could earn credits for the google play store and every now and then you would get a trap question usually formatted something like "Have you used x product" or "how well do you know x" where x does not exist. Anyone who answers incorrectly will see limited surveys in the future.

Google Rewards still exists, and as recently as a couple of weeks ago had a question in that format (though I am not sure if it was actually a nonexistent brand, and I don't recall enough about the question to look it up now).

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you're right, the engagement is the most important part. It's not the ease of creating the site, it's the ease of directing people to view / subscribe / communicate through & return to it & that is a very difficult problem to solve if you do not simply approach as a standard social network. I guess to me there's a niche for smaller scale networks, which would suit those with lesser engagement needs. Most people w…

> view / subscribe / communicate You can still comment and subscribe on a blog, can't you? RSS is dead is only a figure of speech. You can still have a blogroll on your site, can't you? Remember FOAF? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology) My point is that we don't need to wish for a "Social network with less features". We just need to embrace technology that already exists and that has been ignored by big tec…

Totally agree, just think that we're talking about the same thing.

The technology exists, but it's making it super easy to sign up for completely tech illiterate users that's the problem.

I actually think tech-literacy on a wider scale is probably worse than it was 10 years ago because people stopped using the wide web and starting logging onto facebook and nothing else.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#243
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Readers think of Reddit title as discussion prompts. The combination of subreddit theme and post title can easily start a discussion on “close enough” topic. One of the suggestion for increasing engagement is to disable link posts and only allow text posts.

I see HN in the same way. It happens so often that HN discussion is much better that article itself that I go there first, and RTFA only if the discussion makes me want to read it. For this article, I tried to read it after reading a few comments, but got bored.

The readability of lot of web articles tend to be quite poor as they are written from viewpoint of SEO rather than readability. I rarely can read complete web article unless it was published in a paper magazine or newspaper.

HN used to be good. Recently, I have seen groupthink taking hold, hostility toward dissension, and opinions are not that knowledgable and educated on controversial topics. The HN quality of discussion is not that different from themed serious subreddits.

Give Reddit a chance, find subreddits in your area of interest.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#244

The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement, follower count, retweets, and likes. In my feed, the highest signal to noise ratio comes from people who aren't commenting on any and every trending topic. Instead, they're busy doing real work, away from Twitter, only occasionally checking in to share something. Likewise…

> The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement, follower count, retweets, and likes.

Interesting. Do you have some specific heuristic for identifying those people?

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#246
post #218
post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

I have done several experiments in Reddit. I post a link with a plausible title and credible looking 404 to credible domain with made up url. In a big subreddit you easily get 30 top level comments before first comment says that link does not work or is fake. Discussion goes on and on without pause. People treat the title as a writing prompt. One of the best writing prompts is pseudo-philosophical techno-bro life or…

You hacked the crowd to get them to rate headlines !

Can it be monetized ?

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be funny if it still let you comment, but it showed your test results besides your comment.

It would be funny if so many didn't already wear their ignorance as a badge of pride. Imagine an article on vaccinations--many who would be posting exactly the sort of nonsense you'd be hoping to prevent would wear their "understood 0% of the facts in the article" as a badge of pride, and others who agreed with them would interpret it as such.

At least 0% would require more knowledge than guessing. You might even accidentally educate a few anti-vaxxers, who would be forced to learn what they were disagreeing with. (Yes, I know it still wouldn't help.)
Post reply on HN