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1000 Days on Hacker News – My Experience So Far

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Re: 1000 Days on Hacker News – My Experience So Far

#3

Post by ekianjo »

khadim wrote: post #2

Agree with all your points. For new projects hn also helped in getting early adopters & of-course show hn (feedback).

Yeha, Show HN is a great way to get feedback and I do pay close attention to these kind of posts as well. It kind of validates the potential user interest, too.

Re: 1000 Days on Hacker News – My Experience So Far

#5

Post by tikhonj »

For me, HN has had one very big, very concrete effect: it's forced me to write more. Not write well, necessarily. Not edit, unfortunately. But write. Before I started commenting here, I only ever wrote coherently for school and never liked it. Now, after quite a bit of practice, I'm much more comfortable getting my ideas across.

This reminds me of "How to Write without Writing"[1] by Jeff Atwood. He explains how StackOverflow tricks programmers into writing more and therefore improving. While I love StackOverflow, I think Hacker News does this much better: StackOverflow posts tend to be too short and too technical, while HN posts are all over the place. HN also gives much more direct feedback: in my experience, voting is correlated with how well a comment is written and people's responses to a comment show where it was effective and where it could have been clearer.

[1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/02/how-to-write-withou...

Hacker News made writing a game, and playing that game really helped me write.

Re: 1000 Days on Hacker News – My Experience So Far

#7

Post by Udo »

Wow, site is hosed already. It's probably a good idea to do some basic load testing on your site before submitting a link ;)

Anyway, this is day 1130 for me. Before here I was on Slashdot, but had largely stopped using it before that. All its weaknesses and rough edges aside, to me HN is simply the most worthwhile forum I've ever been on.

I get most of my tech news from here, it has largely replaced RSS to be honest, it's a great place to see what smart people are up to right now, and finally it often provides content in the discussions that surpasses the content of the original article. I also enjoy discussions with smart people who don't necessarily agree with me (as long as it's civil).

One of its most valuable properties is the fact that it doesn't really matter (that much) who you are. HN gives virtual nobodies like me the chance to interact with extremely talented people and I'm really grateful for that.

Re: 1000 Days on Hacker News – My Experience So Far

#8

Post by ekianjo »

willvarfar wrote: post #6

Its a nice positive self-improvement post, but I'd be interested in what the OP thinks has changed over that time re tone, content, titling, policies etc and everything meta.

Well, there is definitely some trend to see more general, non-hacking related topics featured on the front page of HN in the past year or so. I think everyone is well aware of that, and that is expected when a social community grows in size, while the karma restrictions and flagging somehow help to keep a certain order, I believe.

The creativity around the posts titles is also mostly gone in recent history, because of the application of new policies. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not.

In terms of the tone, I'm not sure how it has changed. It may be just me, but it seems to me there is more swearing and ad hominem than before in some discussions... while I think it used to be more civil before. But it may just be an impression, again.

Re: 1000 Days on Hacker News – My Experience So Far

#9

Post by jliechti1 »

EDIT: Site seems down, cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pandora...

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When I first came across HN (around the time I started programming), I was a bit overwhelmed and intimidated upon seeing the projects/people/success stories in the community. I spent a lot of time just reading before I started posting. I've heard other people express similar thoughts.

Eventually, I just decided to start posting - there is no need to "wait" until you have a certain skill/expertise in an area. You can still make valid contributions to the discussion (of course, please read the posting guidelines).

So any lurkers out there, I encourage you to stop lurking and join the community. I did - and have consequently met many interesting people through HN and learned a lot of new things.

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On another note, the only group of people that seem to get tech/"internet" related (being purposely vague here) news faster than HN is people who use Reddit. I've had many conversations with friends who use Reddit where I will say "Hey, did you hear about X?" and they respond "Yeah, I already saw it Y hours ago on Reddit." Usually the difference isn't very large.

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