171–180 of 248 posts
(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…
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> [0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que ... simonw is a smart guy, definitely an HN darling for anything LLM related nowadays but at the same time he is constantly pushing for his personal brand, IMO. Maybe unconsciously and just because he is very prolific but still, I get that feeling.
He writes because he loves writing. People can tell, and thus like reading it. If that creates a "brand", there's not much he can do about it. He's an active, valuable, good-faith participant here, has a subject matter expertise in something HN obviously cares very deeply about, and isn't going anywhere.
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How do you know they don't? How can you show this? It's fine if it's just vibes but just want to know what is known and can be said.
I can't know for sure. For me, it's just the "eyeball method" of comparing HN and different subreddits on Reddit. As to how I (or anyone) could show this, here are a few example questions: 1. How many examples of stealthy but otherwise blatant promotion do you see in the comments? Not every astroturfing campaign will be successful or original, so you'd be able to notice some patterns. Plus, HN is already commercially…
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.
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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.
Not everything has to have an explicit purpose beyond “this is a good and valuable thing”. Why do I take in parcels for my neighbour if a courier knocks on my door? She doesn’t pay me. It wouldn’t cause me any harm if I didn’t. But it makes the place nicer to live, and I’ve become friends with her as a result. She invited me to dinner recently and fed me delicious food, and we drank very good champagne. That was an u…
They're not promoting startups to investors via HN, it's a different kind of promotion. But 'pool of eligible hires' is quite worth a few salaries to maintain, even if others get value from it.
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Thank you, dang. Your forum is the best one on the internet, and it's in no small part thanks to your moderation efforts.
I like that, this really is Dan's forum by now. Maybe YC should gift wrap it and make it a nice Christmas present.
Then you can unlock posting when you realize it's "dan g" not "darn it, dang".
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Reddit is significantly more popular/successful than HN even for tech. HN is its own little world and that’s fine.
Popular isn't necessarily good, and success can be measured in many different ways.
"My son is a successful artist, and like Van Gogh he's only ever sold one piece of art in his life" said no mother ever.
Now post mortem, Van Gogh has certainly "enjoyed" more success, by many peoples' rankings.
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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…
Theres 3 (4?) horse men of online communities. 1 Identity topics, eg: Politics/Religion 2 Insufficient moderation 3 NSFW content 4 Inability to distinguish experienced commenters or valid content from plausible sounding content. I.E. Low Subject Expertise thresholds. 4 is what keeps a community boring, while keeping the SNR high.
"Horsemen", as in the Apocalyptic Tetrad?
> " 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 never "no levers" - the best you can do is make sure that the levers you know about are aligned with the purpose of the site.
And that works pretty well. Don't SEO-post, write a blog about some technical aspect of SEO-posting, and you'll do better.
HN-posting successfully can't really be done "at scale" - by design.
Here's a successful formula, but takes some time.
Participate, read things you know about and are interested in. Post comments. Eventually you'll find yourself repeating, or linking to previous comments. Write a blog post about that. Post it.
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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…
I have a different take. If someone uses effort to post something genuinely interesting just so they can advertise their blog, good. You don't have to click the link, and it's better than nothing (assuming other comments here aren't as interesting). Like https://xkcd.com/810/
Cf: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46303291>.