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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?

#181

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #127
noosphr wrote: post #107

Earlier 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. 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 Combinat…

This. That level of reach is part of what makes it amazing. I have a chance to 'talk' with people, who are levels above me in technical realm.

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

#182

Post by AbstractH24 »

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…

> (I'm a mod here)

Are there any other mods besides you?

Also it just occured to me, is dang one person or a account the represents all mods?

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

#183

Post by ssl-3 »

IAmBroom wrote: post #177
hostyle wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popular isn't necessarily good, and success can be measured in many different ways.

But to exclude popularity from the definition of success is highly atypical, at best. "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.

It is certainly true that one of the ways in which success can be measured is sales.

What is Y Combinator's HN selling? Are they successful in that effort?

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

#184

Post by ErroneousBosh »

Y_Y wrote: post #152
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say, isn't "(I'm a mod here)" kind of an understatement? Oida, he has a pager for it.

Is "oida" here a Greek word or a typo or something else? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BC%B6%CE%B4%CE%B1

"Dude".

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

#185

Post by saaaaaam »

bombcar wrote: post #175
saaaaaam wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 started it for particular reasons, which can be examined. It's not bad that they did so, but your purpose and what the GP said are basically the same thing. 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.

There’s a piece here, written by Paul Graham, which talks about why he started hacker news, written two years after it was launched.

If we take what he wrote at face value, I don’t think the purpose was primarily its promotional value.

https://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

_ Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news._

_ Hacker News is an experiment, and an experiment in a very young field. Sites of this type are only a few years old. Internet conversation generally is only a few decades old. So we've probably only discovered a fraction of what we eventually will._

_ Hacker News is definitely useful. I've learned a lot from things I've read on HN. I've written several essays that began as comments there. So I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time._

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

#186

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

esperent wrote: post #80
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #6

> " 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". Everyone wants to believe that their community doesn't have levers. But this is just wishful thinking, ego talking. Of course HN has levers, of course the community here can be manipulated. The easiest way I can see would be to frame a helpful, curious question to which your service just happens to be the answer. So then you most an Ask HN like "can anyone help me to understand why people do…

People trying that usually use freshly created accounts or accounts that have zero / low activity except to promote their service. It sticks out like a sore thumb. I could point to a couple of examples right now.

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

#187

Post by gabrielsroka »

AbstractH24 wrote: post #182
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…

> (I'm a mod here) Are there any other mods besides you? Also it just occured to me, is dang one person or a account the represents all mods?

There are other mods.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558671

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

#188

Post by [deleted] »

yakbarber wrote: post #137
noosphr wrote: post #107

Earlier 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…

Reddit is significantly more popular/successful than HN even for tech. HN is its own little world and that’s fine.

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by tptacek »

huhtenberg wrote: post #168
tptacek wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You flagged an otherwise good comment because it linked out to a newsletter?

Not the GP, but, yeah, because it is still a form of spam.

If it's only a link to a newsletter, sure. And "signing" a comment breaks a norm here. But if it's otherwise a good comment, seems like a poor use of "flag"; one of the rare instances where maybe you want to leave a short, polite note ("don't sign off with links to your newsletter, we don't sign things here").

Flagging deprives everyone else of the comment, and is especially hostile if there's already a thread sprouting from that comment.

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