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Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#21

Post by kqr »

baubino wrote: post #7

This post makes me feel really old. HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond. Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as o…

> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.

That's an oversimplification. There are things that get responses because they're flamebait rather than interesting, and then even more interesting things that never get any discussion going.

I don't know if the residual factor is just "chance" or if there are controllable inputs involved.

(One thing I do suspect but cannot confirm is that article title has a large effect. Interesting stuff with bad title gets overlooked, and vice versa.)

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#23

Post by antognini »

I've found that there can be a lot of randomness for what makes the front page. Not too many people read the "New" page and articles drop off it pretty quickly, so it can be hard for a niche article to attract the handful of votes it needs to appear on the front page. (Though there is a "second chance" feature which helps to ameliorate this issue.) So there's a lot of randomness to what makes it onto the front page.

For instance I submitted an article three times (spaced a year apart). The first two times the article got no upvotes. The third time it got 600+ and hit the top of the front page. It's just a matter of who happens to be looking at the New page at the time.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#25

Post by superdisk »

kqr wrote: post #21
baubino wrote: post #7

This post makes me feel really old. HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond. Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as o…

> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond. That's an oversimplification. There are things that get responses because they're flamebait rather than interesting, and then even more interesting things that never get any discussion going. I don't know if the residual factor is just "chance" or if there are controllable inputs involved. (One thing I do suspect but cannot confirm is that a…

This is true. There are a few stock topics that will consistently get the fanboys out (Postgres, Ruby, Rust, SQLite) which is, IMO, usually just uninteresting fodder. And then interesting stuff which requires some intellectual engagement very often rots.

HN does have a much higher ratio of gems to dirt than any other place though, so I'm still here for the forseeable future :)

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#26

Post by underdeserver »

baubino wrote: post #7

This post makes me feel really old. HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond. Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as o…

> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.

A simple way to refute this is to note that some links were posted multiple times and only got traction on the second or third time.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#28

Post by PaulRobinson »

baubino wrote: post #7

This post makes me feel really old. HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond. Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as o…

Couldn't agree with you more. The internet has, to borrow the word of the moment, become enshittified, and people think that's "normal".

People accept that platforms should be centralised, and that they should harvest your data in order to sell it to adtech companies who will then feed it to an industry that learns in real-time how to prey on your darkest fears to sell you things you don't need but might make you feel slightly less sad for a second. And people just accept it: that's normal these days.

They even call it doom-scrolling, and don't ask "wait, should I want to scroll through actual doom? Is the occasional video that makes me smile really worth it all?"

Perhaps it's my age, but I can't understand anybody who says their main form of media consumption is YouTube. How? How do you actually put up with that, knowing what is behind every mouse movement and click, and the knowledge that every single pixel in front of you is being tweaked by robotic neuroscientists squeezing every drop out of A/B tests to make you feel like utter crap? Like, seriously, WTAF?

HN is popular within its niche precisely because it isn't like that. It is not "a platform", in the modern and now normalised sense. It links out to other sites and asks people to come back together to discuss what they saw there. Old school. No ad tracking. No doom scrolling. Pick what you like. Click it, don't click it. Discuss it, don't discuss it. Nobody is tracking "engagement". There's some gamification, but does anyone _really_ care?

This type of interaction is entirely native to my generation and older (I just squeak into millennial, on the older side), but feels completely bonkers to people who think Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are what is normal and how the Internet works.

Some of know they're not normal. We know they're aberrations, ghouls that prey on unwitting masses.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#29

Post by PaulRobinson »

underdeserver wrote: post #26
baubino wrote: post #7

This post makes me feel really old. HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond. Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as o…

> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond. A simple way to refute this is to note that some links were posted multiple times and only got traction on the second or third time.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#30

Post by [deleted] »

underdeserver wrote: post #26
baubino wrote: post #7

This post makes me feel really old. HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond. Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as o…

> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond. A simple way to refute this is to note that some links were posted multiple times and only got traction on the second or third time.

[deleted]
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