Top Hacker News commenters of 2021 • Hacker News Board

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#131

Post by caslon » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #79

caslon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not exactly the truth. The majority of Hacker News users can't downvote, and because of that, you're almost certain to get more upvotes than downvotes, unless your comment has few redeeming qualities. The majority of Hacker News also doesn't really upvote much. Your typical front page post has under a thousand votes, and posts are the easiest things to upvote. Comments rarely get over a hundred, and almost nev…

> it's not an echo chamber It very much is, to the point that this place is derisively called "the orange website" by those who can see it for that. You might agree with the precepts so it doesn't seem that way to you, but the sooner you can recognize them, the better off you'll be.

I derogatorily call this website "the orange website." That doesn't make it an echo chamber. For as many awful opinions on political topics or type systems there are on this site, there are people who object to them and comment that they do. Hacker News has a tendency to let people say offensive things; this doesn't make it an echo chamber. It doesn't make it good (about 1/5 of the threads are good), but it doesn't make it an echo chamber. Even things that should be pretty much just echoes, like threads about people who killed themselves, often aren't. Because even when someone has killed themselves on this website, people will always come out of the woodwork to say that it was their fault, in contrast to popular opinion. It's not an echo chamber, it's an amplifier.

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#132

Post by caslon » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

tester34 wrote: post #77

caslon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The formula is pretty simple: Write cool comments about things you know about in threads that aren't dead yet. If you're really trying, you can accumulate over a hundred points in a day without posting any articles. The site is basically a game if you're optimizing for points, and it's better designed than reddit because you have to actually know things to get them. Have a niche programming language you like? Talk ab…

>The site is basically a game if you're optimizing for points, and it's better designed than reddit because you have to actually know things to get them. Haha. Actually HN seems to be least technical community (when it comes to arguing) out of all those I know (reddit, forums) Discussions raaarelly *try* to go into the technical details, let alone deeply. I don't think I've seen more than 5 code snippets over year on…

Those threads earn so few points they're barely worth mentioning. I'm talking about point-earning. Technical threads earn lots of points, and are in the scope of this discussion because of it.

I will point out, though, that throwing code over the wall doesn't necessarily point toward one forum being more technical than another. A discussion on type systems or hygienic macros has far more technical depth than someone responding to a post with a code example of how to do something in React.

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#133

Post by TigeriusKirk » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 10:31 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #23

This only measures the number of comments; it would be interesting to know the karma difference accrued in a year. It may produce the exact same ranking, as intuitively karma is probably heavily correlated with comment frequency... but maybe not?

There's an all-time karma list as a feature of the board. https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#134

Post by caslon » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 10:54 PM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #103

caslon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The point" is because it's fun to farm points. This is the same reason people play in competitive video games, or even why people posted videos of themselves online before there was a financial incentive to. It's fun to do something inherently collaborative, like being viewed by an audience. Hacker News fills the same niche for me as competitive video game tournaments do (during a certain time of the year, an easy w…

Would monetizing points here really be worth it? Even if you had a ton of points and made the front page with your new startup for a whole day. If it wasn't actually an amazing piece of code, or truly original, you would get endless amounts of blowback. Arguably this is the worst possible place to debut anything. You have to be some kind of masochist. And if you spent a dime on farming for it, God Help you. I mean, I…

It absolutely would be, and a lot of people get away with it quite well. It's more subtle than what you're thinking, though, because it doesn't mean just posting ads.

It takes root in posting really good content, at least for a while. You get your points up, get seen as a contributor, and then you start posting your own blog posts. Nothing explicitly an ad at first; you're just trying to get people to start thinking of your blog as something that usually has good reads, and that . Then you eventually post about a thing you made that you think the audience would want to buy, and, not exactly shockingly, they do!

By framing it using something like "My startup failed... again. An analysis," or "Just got the first few bites on my product, after years of trying," you let the audience escape the feeling of being advertised to despite the motive being entirely profit.

There was one user that was so good at this they were on the front page nearly every month of last year and they sold $60k worth in units because of it, never getting called out for what they were doing. To be generous to them, the content was good when it wasn't advertisements. You have to remember that what's popular on Hacker News on any given day will also circulate around a bunch of tech sites that are bad at coming up with their own content.

One person that I actually know built a complete business out of subtly using HN for advertising.

This takes root in even smaller ways, though. Like someone popping up in every thread that's remotely relevant to say, "Hey! We're building a product that does this at lazyfiveletternamedotio! Check it out, it seems like it fits your use-case." Sure, they'll get criticized, sometimes. But they'll also get bites. And when you're selling software as a service substitute for $600/mo, it doesn't take very many bites to make being criticized on Hacker News worth it. Doubly so when you're taking venture and need to up your numbers for the next round.

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#135

Post by toomuchtodo » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 3:59 AM UTC

Here’s to spending more time on things that matter in 2022. Great post.

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#136

Post by sershe » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 6:17 AM UTC

Heh, I came here to lurk for a better slashdot/lower-volume r/programming, but I'm actually in the upper Nk because I get dragged into all kinds of political discussions against the part of my will that I endorse.

It would be nice if there was a "solving the world's problems" tag and an rss feed without it ;)

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#137

Post by ignoramous » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 12:06 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #121

ignoramous wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure I agree, HN makes the username visible right next to the post? Yes, but grayed out, in the background, so to speak. I usually do not notice the username at all ( capableweb , hi! this is the first time I've noticed you...). Especially the usernames next to topics/stories are completely ignored by my brain's eyes.

Interesting that while your brain seems to ignore the usernames, my brain automatically parses the username when reading the comment, somehow. I'm not thinking about it, it just gets associated automatically. As I mentioned before, I grew up back when the internet was mostly text, so maybe that's why? Are you perhaps a bit younger than that?

> As I mentioned before, I grew up back when the internet was mostly text, so maybe that's why? Are you perhaps a bit younger than that?

I don't think it is age-related, but I was exposed to the web just when AJAX / DHTML / SOAP was taking off (c. 2006/7).

Re: Top Hacker News commenters of 2021

#138

Post by mgh2 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 5:59 PM UTC

wly_cdgr wrote: post #126

bambax wrote: post #23

This only measures the number of comments; it would be interesting to know the karma difference accrued in a year. It may produce the exact same ranking, as intuitively karma is probably heavily correlated with comment frequency... but maybe not?

Karma in my experience has a lot more to do with comment tone and with reading the room well than with the quality of the comment's content. I accumulated I think about 500-600 karma in 2021, but most of that was just me saying stuff that a lot of people in the thread wanted to believe is true. On the other hand I lost a lot of karma from comments that had the same quality or higher in terms of content, but where I w…

Every community is bound to contain some bias, that is unavoidable. But at least "nerds" or the more educated are bound to decrease this human error with a more "peer-reviewed" process in curating information, that is one purpose of HN.