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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?

#211

Post by araes »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #34
KellyCriterion wrote: post #22

New Job discipline born: "Hacker News Visibility Consultant Services", like there are companys optimizing your position in the app stores :-D

[Laughs nervously] I bet that this isn’t an exaggeration. Being highly-ranked on HN can probably give a startup a huge advantage, in the hype department. I guarantee that LLMs are currently being feverishly trained on HN front pages, for the last few years, and we’re gonna be seeing “link farm” sites, specifically designed to rank high on HN. I enjoy it here. I don’t hang out on any other social media, so this place…

There's a bunch of LLMs. Not actually that difficult to find.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

There's even some pretty obviously shady ones doing stuff like purposefully evading LLM detection systems.

It also does not take that much of a search online to find people trying to buy upvotes, comments, accounts. A lot get banned, yet people are still obviously trying.

Generally agree with you. Lot of sites over the years that have eventually been turned into wastelands. Predictabot LLM SEO spew that eventually rendered interacting there meaningless. The auto-comment, auto-review stuff has been around longer than the LLM idea, it just wasn't quite so accessible. Now its like every teenager has been handed bioweapons.

Unfortunately, (opinion) most of the mainline World Wide Web has been reduced to content that's difficult to parse from Stock Market summary bots, and most of the old vibrant forums have slowly been obliterated, so there's not that many places to go to.

Huge portion of the World Wide Web that just goes from site to site ruining the experience until there's nothing left, and no reason to participate, or even glance. Their calculations wasted turning each "platform" into a pile of vomit no-one wants to interact with.

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

#212

Post by lovich »

dang wrote: post #192
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 I should probably clarify this a bit. It's true that HN sponsors Launch HNs (and Show HNs) by YC startups. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html . However, YC would not be funding HN if that were the only reason for it. It's a secondary factor. Far more important than promoting existing startups is attracting founders who might start new…

I interpreted their comment more along the lines of

“Don’t critique ycombinator companies or go against their interests, otherwise you’re fine”

YC companies and their founders have special privileges on here and there is an opaque moderation system. There is no data you could provide beyond full transparency into your entire organization(obviously not happening) that would convince anyone that there isn’t influence that they have over communication here

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

#213

Post by nsagent »

tptacek wrote: post #207
darkwater wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not denying that, in fact I think it's basically because he writes a lot and participates a lot. But yet, it can give the feeling that he is curating his own brand. But probably it's just an organic thing, not a fabricated one.

It's an extraordinarily rude thing to say about an HN regular with a long track record of constructive participation.

I'll be honest and blunt: I try to avoid his blog posts and comments as much as possible because I do find his contributions to be super spammy. It's about the frequency of his self-promotion (as a researcher in NLP it's tiresome to constantly see his self-promotion on nearly all posts on HN related to LLMs). Seems I'm not the only one.

If he posted on the ML subreddit while I was still a mod there (left after the API kerfuffle) I would have messaged him and asked him politely to tone it down.

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

#214

Post by tptacek »

nsagent wrote: post #213
tptacek wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an extraordinarily rude thing to say about an HN regular with a long track record of constructive participation.

I'll be honest and blunt: I try to avoid his blog posts and comments as much as possible because I do find his contributions to be super spammy. It's about the frequency of his self-promotion (as a researcher in NLP it's tiresome to constantly see his self-promotion on nearly all posts on HN related to LLMs). Seems I'm not the only one. If he posted on the ML subreddit while I was still a mod there (left after the AP…

Where by "self promotion" you mean "sharing his thoughts"?

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

#215

Post by NaOH »

tptacek wrote: post #214
nsagent wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be honest and blunt: I try to avoid his blog posts and comments as much as possible because I do find his contributions to be super spammy. It's about the frequency of his self-promotion (as a researcher in NLP it's tiresome to constantly see his self-promotion on nearly all posts on HN related to LLMs). Seems I'm not the only one. If he posted on the ML subreddit while I was still a mod there (left after the AP…

Where by "self promotion" you mean "sharing his thoughts"?

I have no issue with simonw's work/comments; I've never gone near it because it's far afield from my non-tech world. He is, though, someone who breaks one HN guideline:

>Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

His submissions here are usually to his own work. Admittedly, that HN guideline is like an obscure 19th-century law which is still on the books that few know of and is never enforced. Even so, he's clearly well-regarded based on the amount of conversation his blog posts elicit.

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

#216

Post by tptacek »

NaOH wrote: post #215
tptacek wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where by "self promotion" you mean "sharing his thoughts"?

I have no issue with simonw's work/comments; I've never gone near it because it's far afield from my non-tech world. He is, though, someone who breaks one HN guideline: >Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. His submissions here are usually to his own work. Admittedly, that HN guideline is like an obscure…

I don't know why he would bother submitting any of his own pieces --- they're all going to get submitted anyways.

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

#217

Post by nsagent »

tptacek wrote: post #214
nsagent wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be honest and blunt: I try to avoid his blog posts and comments as much as possible because I do find his contributions to be super spammy. It's about the frequency of his self-promotion (as a researcher in NLP it's tiresome to constantly see his self-promotion on nearly all posts on HN related to LLMs). Seems I'm not the only one. If he posted on the ML subreddit while I was still a mod there (left after the AP…

Where by "self promotion" you mean "sharing his thoughts"?

[flagged]

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

#218

Post by tptacek »

nsagent wrote: post #217
tptacek wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where by "self promotion" you mean "sharing his thoughts"?

[flagged]

His LLM tool rules. I cite it too. Used it a bunch earlier this year for the municipal data work I was donig. Why wouldn't he cite it? Avoiding these kinds of mean-spirited criticisms would require him to twist himself into a pretzel. I'd rather we just all agree not to say shit like this.

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

#220

Post by tomhow »

lovich wrote: post #212
dang wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies I should probably clarify this a bit. It's true that HN sponsors Launch HNs (and Show HNs) by YC startups. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html . However, YC would not be funding HN if that were the only reason for it. It's a secondary factor. Far more important than promoting existing startups is attracting founders who might start new…

I interpreted their comment more along the lines of “Don’t critique ycombinator companies or go against their interests, otherwise you’re fine” YC companies and their founders have special privileges on here and there is an opaque moderation system. There is no data you could provide beyond full transparency into your entire organization(obviously not happening) that would convince anyone that there isn’t influence t…

Apart from job postings and Launch HNs, YC-funded startups don't have access to any information or influence that isn't available to anyone else.

We literally give exactly the same information and help to YC-funded startups as we do to non-YC-funded startups who ask for assistance with their Show HNs. That's because giving “extra help” to YC-funded startups is far less valuable (to everyone including the startup themselves [1]) than just making HN interesting to readers and showcasing cool projects, no matter who has built them.

[1] More than almost anything else, what I've learned from moderating HN is that “extra help” to get onto the front page of HN is of barely any help at all. That is, if the post isn't interesting enough to earn significant numbers of upvotes and good comments very quickly, it will disappear off the front page very quickly. Also, any time a story is on the front page that the community doesn’t think belongs there, it feels off and attracts flags and complaints.

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