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Hacker News Parody Thread

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Re: Hacker News Parody Thread

#21

Post by simonsarris »

Good god this was funny, right down to the usernames.

But now its time to be very HN about it.

> Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat.

Actually I think I have a solution to this, though its just guesswork.

I'm not particularly well known here (or anywhere), but either people actually like the words I say, or I simply have yet to make a complete ass out of myself. (I think one of these is more plausible, but who is to say.)

My average karma on HN is 20.59, which seems to be a lot. Specifically, on the Leaderboard[1] that puts me in fourth place among the HN big names for average karma (though I have nowhere near the total karma to appear there).

I've noticed that when I reply to a post, even if there's already 30 comments, my post usually ends up at the top. And it stays there, even if no one replies, and even if I don't get many or any upvotes for it, for a few hours sometimes.

Alas I don't know for certain, but my guess is that if you have a high average karma then your posts are automatically weighted higher, so you can inject your opinion into almost any topic at any time. This affords me the luxury of being a contradictory whine even if I come late to the party!

Can anyone confirm or deny my suspicion here?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Re: Hacker News Parody Thread

#23

Post by sophacles »

EGreg wrote: post #13
Xcelerate wrote: post #8

I disagree with the author. This isn't exactly a parody thread. A parody is "an imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialise an original work" [1]. For one thing, I would hardly call Hacker News comments "original work", and a simple creation like this hardly captures the full scope and breadth of comments on here. Furthermore, I'm not really sure why this belongs on HN, because it's not very technical, a…

I would like to piggyback off the original comment, and disagree. >People on here don't appreciate humor How could you possibly come to such a conclusion? I appreciate humor, and I am sure others do as well.

I think that everyone likes humor, we just also know what isn't funny.

Re: Hacker News Parody Thread

#24

Post by baby »

Xcelerate wrote: post #8

I disagree with the author. This isn't exactly a parody thread. A parody is "an imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialise an original work" [1]. For one thing, I would hardly call Hacker News comments "original work", and a simple creation like this hardly captures the full scope and breadth of comments on here. Furthermore, I'm not really sure why this belongs on HN, because it's not very technical, a…

No, OP is correct.

* You omitted that HN is also a place to talk meta.

* You misunderstand that a parody is not supposed to capture the full scope of something.

* It was funny to read, that's all that matters.

Re: Hacker News Parody Thread

#25

Post by [deleted] »

Xcelerate wrote: post #8

I disagree with the author. This isn't exactly a parody thread. A parody is "an imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialise an original work" [1]. For one thing, I would hardly call Hacker News comments "original work", and a simple creation like this hardly captures the full scope and breadth of comments on here. Furthermore, I'm not really sure why this belongs on HN, because it's not very technical, a…

[deleted]

Re: Hacker News Parody Thread

#26

Post by DannyBee »

leeoniya wrote: post #5

"Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat. I can probably piggy-back off a top comment, though, those comment threads aren't long yet..." actually, this text in the reply box highlights a huge problem with threaded (and voted) discussions in general: there is little incentive to reply to any already-huge thread, even with valuable content. i've been thinking of how to solve this issue for the past week and have…

I'm curious what you came up with. I used to work on Google Moderator, which was a project created to solve this problem for non-threaded discussion (which is even worse), and we had some neat solutions. We displayed comments to users to be voted on, and ended up using a variant of wilson confidence intervals not just to rank, but to figure out which comments we should display to users to be voted on.

Re: Hacker News Parody Thread

#28

Post by [deleted] »

sophacles wrote: post #23
EGreg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to piggyback off the original comment, and disagree. >People on here don't appreciate humor How could you possibly come to such a conclusion? I appreciate humor, and I am sure others do as well.

I think that everyone likes humor, we just also know what isn't funny.

[deleted]

Re: Hacker News Parody Thread

#29

Post by friendly_chap »

leeoniya wrote: post #5

"Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat. I can probably piggy-back off a top comment, though, those comment threads aren't long yet..." actually, this text in the reply box highlights a huge problem with threaded (and voted) discussions in general: there is little incentive to reply to any already-huge thread, even with valuable content. i've been thinking of how to solve this issue for the past week and have…

I generally agree, however, your comment would be more valuable if you would include verifiable information instead of anecdotes and personal opinion, and you would actually analyse the problem instead of throwing around vague criticism.

My take on the subject is:

This effect can be mostly attributed to the fact that a top comment means more exposure, and given that the upvotes outweight the downvotes on the response (which is true, since that's why it is at the top), by deductive reasoning we arrive to the obvious conclusion that more exposure will further cement the position of a given post.

Also we must not forget about the effect of peer pressure[1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_pressure

For those with a lack of humour, I include a smiley here: :-)

Re: Hacker News Parody Thread

#30

Post by moron4hire »

leeoniya wrote: post #5

"Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat. I can probably piggy-back off a top comment, though, those comment threads aren't long yet..." actually, this text in the reply box highlights a huge problem with threaded (and voted) discussions in general: there is little incentive to reply to any already-huge thread, even with valuable content. i've been thinking of how to solve this issue for the past week and have…

There seems to be some level of encouragement for letting old discussions fall away, though. The ranking algorithm specifically has it built in.
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