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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?

#141

Post by robot-wrangler »

nacozarina wrote: post #118
MathiasPius wrote: post #74

It sometimes blows my mind how questions which essentially boil down to "How do I best manipulate you for personal gain?" can be asked in such an unabashed fashion.

Hello, fellow nerds! How do you recruit other nerds? They mostly seem to be into their own thing. How can I energize engagement?

> They mostly seem to be into their own thing. How can I energize engagement?

You jest, but the best way is to give the nerds only a feed and don't allow any other organizing principles for navigating the content. Lured by the promise of something interesting sometimes, people who are trying to follow their curiosity for math/archaeology will stumble into threads about corporations and products, throw ideas out in public for free, get sucked into politics, etc etc

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

#142

Post by miki123211 »

p-e-w wrote: post #99
jacquesm wrote: post #47

HN 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…

[flagged]

As a screen reader user who has an account since 2018 and >10k karma, I beg to disagree.

Could it be better? For sure. Is it in the bottom 10% of sites I've ever seen? Definitely not.

Please stop trying to use a group you're not a part of for your own political purposes, especially if you don't know what you're talking about.

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

#143

Post by miki123211 »

dang wrote: post #8

(I'm a mod here) It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks. But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are…

Hey Dang, I really appreciate all the work you guys are doing.

However, I feel like there's a lot more repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion on HN in the last few months than there has ever been.

I feel like every other thread on here devolves into an unhinged rant about AI, enshittification, privacy, or crazy conspiracy theories about age restrictions on social media and the politicians passing them (which I'm personally a staunch opponent of). It's all the same arguments over and over, most of them without a shred of evidence. It feels like people aren't arguing in good faith any more, we're all just screaming our politics at (or past) each other. This didn't use to be the case.

(yes I know I have showdead on, those are not the dead comments).

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

#144

Post by oska »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #35
dang wrote: post #8

(I'm a mod here) It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks. But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are…

A great take, and thanks for your all hard work dang. Yesterday the top comment on two stories I went to discuss had deep and meaningful content, before the last line which was a "and I talk about this stuff all the time on my newsletter [link]", and I was conflicted. Same poster each time. The poster had done the HN thing: responded with thoughtful examination of TFA, unique and interesting insight, and I don't feel…

The appropriate place to link to your website, newsletter, whatever is on your bio page (which people have to actively click into, specifically because they want to know more about you and potentially find such links).

I agree that linking to your own work in comments is generally bad form.

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

#145

Post by dkga »

jesusofsuburbia wrote: post #116
dang wrote: post #8

(I'm a mod here) It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks. But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are…

Honest question: was an LLM involved in writing this comment? The em-dash style stood out to me

Human user of em dashes here. I can't tell you the number of times people thought my 100% human-made prose was "AI" because of the em dashes.

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

#146

Post by pedrozieg »

Investors talk about HN like it’s a growth lever, but the site mostly behaves like a long-running reading habit with spam defenses. A tiny slice of users on /new decide whether you even get a shot, gravity slowly pushes old stuff down, there’s a “second chance” queue for posts that looked promising but died early, and moderators occasionally hand-tune obvious mistakes. Beyond that, it’s just a bunch of curious people clicking what looks interesting.

The only repeatable “strategy” I’ve seen work is: write things that would be interesting even if HN didn’t exist, and let other people submit them. Trying to treat HN as a distribution channel (carefully timed posts, optimized titles, orchestrated upvotes) reliably backfires because the software + mods are explicitly optimized against that. If you treat it as a weird little newspaper run by nerds for their own curiosity, the dynamics suddenly make a lot more sense.

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

#147

Post by Traubenfuchs »

jacquesm wrote: post #54
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #17

It‘s clearly manipulated/curated, you can tell my some absolutely shitty content with zero comments and zero engagement ending up and staying on the frontpage for quite a while.

I've been here for a while and that's not a pattern that I recognize, could you point out a few examples? I am fairly sure the mods would love to hear about this as well.

It doesn't look like shit content, but:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46310650

posted an hour ago with 4 measly upvotes among other threads with hundreds of upvotes on spot 10?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311092

4 upvotes in 26 comments, also on spot 10 after refresh?

Still zero comments for both! If all you need to end up in the top 10 is 4 upvotes within 30 minutes I could start selling hacker news front page placements right here, right now.

Is the value of an upvote karma based? Is the ranking view based? Are view by high karma accounts worth more? In any case, those two posts are pretty sketchy. No one cares enough to comment on them and they are still on the frontpage.

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

#149

Post by skydhash »

nottorp wrote: post #138
harvey9 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, small font. I forgot how small it is by default because the browser saves the zoom level per page. Indeed, in spite of wearing glasses that correct me 100%, that font is way too small.

I use the default font size on iPhone and iPad. And just bump the zoom up to 133% and 150% on desktop.
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