Is this some kind of a "Reflexive Control" Psyop ?
How much is it worth for you to know ? ;-)
Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
121–130 of 248 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#122The answer is in the name. The word 'hacker' used to more refer to someone who is a tinkerer, diy engineer, curious about how systems, components, etc work. Hacker News is still somewhat true to this ethos, what's popular here aligns with this old-school curiosity mindset. Of course the exact interests of the userbase has changed over the years, but if you spend a lot of time on this forum you eventually understand some of the common themes that get the minds of the hackers turning.
Unfortunately due to the enshittification of things people are conditioned to see HN as something to be gamed and leveraged for personal gain now, but in general it's algorithm-less enough, the the mods are strict enough, (thank god) that the type of content here stays pointed towards the original 'hacker' ideals.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> It reads like “you probably want to game HN; stop doing so”. YES. > HN is completely unusable for people with vision impairments relying on assistive technologies. For one, this is unrelated to allowing marketers to game the system. For two, how much are you hyperbolizing there? I only ask because I was having a conversation in comments with a blind HN-er only like 3 days ago.
The small font and not working with Reader view is not ideal for me, but not such an issue as to force me to search for a solution.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#124To echo what dang said in the thread. It's a place to hang out and learn about new things. Or sometimes old things. It's news, it's history. All with a tech skew. I've had this account since 2008. In that time I've used it in many different ways, including getting stuff onto the front page. Honestly trying to game it doesn't work. Post something people genuinely find interesting and it will make it to the front page…
HN is great for that stuff. Though I genuinely lack a good site with just developers news. HN is not that. I was using Code Project for that but it gone bankrupt. Other dev news sites seems to be closer to facebook with AI generated articles than to actual interesting development stuff.
Yea its a mixed bag. I think some people like https://lobste.rs and there's always https://dev.to. But if that doesn't work there's also infinite sub-reddits on Reddit or classically tailoring your own RSS feed using Feedly or similar. I got to that place where I've curated my source of news but it's by category; Crypto, Dev, Finance, Islam, Politics, Tech, UK, World. I've got a feed for each and it's all grouped in a single UI like this https://mu.xyz/home
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fighting spam is a benefit for everyone and it’s most definitely done on purpose behind closed doors. Yes accessibility would be nice, I agree, but if I’m understaffed, provide free as in beer service where being on the first page is worth millions in marketing spend and being top 1 for a few hours is worth tens if not hundreds so I’m constantly under attack from everyone and their dog who have anything at all to sel…
HN is backed by very, very wealthy people, they could easily afford to fix this going on the assumption that it is as big a problem as the GP says, which I would rather ask the community than make any statements on.
I'm simply reminded of Tim Cook in 2014:
> Mr. Cook replied --with an uncharacteristic display of emotion--that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues. "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." It was the same thing for environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas that don’t have an immediate profit. The company does "a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it."
> Reportedly looking directly at the NCPPR representative, he said, "If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator. Its also the currently last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big. You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer come…
> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. That's up to you, really, you can just ignore them. I know I do. > So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator. Probably, or maybe that is just an overly cynical take. If it were as bad as that I can think of a couple of very easy things they could do to improve on that and they aren…
What do you think is the purpose of news.YCOMBINATOR.com, if it’s not to promote(and make $$$$$) ycombinator?
I am not asking how you use it. I am asking what you believe is the reason the site operator is running it.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#127HN is hard to game on purpose. So stop looking for the levers and participate , that's all there is to it. I've made friends here, have been helped by people on projects that I was busy with, did the reverse, found friends and business partners and spend way too much time. HN is a very interesting slice of the online world, a place that is unlike the rest, sometimes a bit dry but always interesting and extremely usef…
Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator. Its also the currently last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big. You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer come…
> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.
Everything has a cost. For the web, that's typically monetary or your data and attention to advertisers. I think you're right that the cost of Hacker News is that my participation is lending some (tiny incremental) legitimacy to Y Combinator. It's also costing some tiny amount of my attention, in the sense that I may not have heard of Y Combinator if it weren't for Hacker News. For me personally, that is absolutely fine – but I'm glad you made it explicit so that it's a conscious choice.
[Edit: Of course it costs an absolutely vast amount of my attention :-) but I mean only a teeny tiny fraction of that is "payment" in the sense of noticing that Y Combinator exists.]
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#128Theres a whole cottage industry of marketing folks that work on gaming HN. Its a system like any other.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#129> " When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: 'Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.' " ... " If so, what are the real levers, and what do people consistently misunderstand? " There are no "levers". People come to HN to discuss nerdy topics and those that have come to HN to help make those discussions more informed and interesting are welcome. Anyone who comes t…
> There are no "levers".
I disagree, there are always levers. But the "comfort-zone" of HN's mods and crowd is much smaller and more specific, while the attention on misbehaviour is much sharper, so the lever are not as easy to pull as on other platforms. HN is basically hard-mode, compared to any big noisy platform.
> Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately.
That's only true if it's done poorly, or outside HNs core-topics. There is a good deal of sneaky marketing on HN, but usually well integrated into the normal flow of comments, so It's either accepted in context, or low enough to fly under the radar. In a nutshell, this means, everything is accepted, as long as it brings value, high entertainment or satisfy curiosity, and is not just selling stupidly in your face.
At the end, HN is still a platform of smarter and more educated people, and they want to be handled on their level. If you can match this, you can pull every lever they've given space for. But of course, that's not something many can easily do.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
#130When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.” Unless you're building a start up where the potential customers are specifically HN and Reddit readers, get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots. As lovely and wonderful as the readers of HN and Reddit are, being loved on HN or Reddit means essentially nothing . Peopl…
> get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots. Surely idiot investors are the easiest to get money from?
You don't want to be beholden to an idiot, or at least I don't