HN people rediscovering the /. effect? Learnt nothing new at all.
What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
21–30 of 111 posts
Re: What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
#22Really interesting read on how much interaction HN brings. There is a lot to be said for quality over quantity when it comes to page views. I believe you are wrong about dismissing that top comment in the other post as snarky, negative and useless. That comment has a lot of very useful information from someone who appears to have been doing the Thailand thing longer than you have. 1) Thai law was brought up a number…
Maybe some exuberant HN stories need a counterpoint and that's the purpose served by those negative #1 comments. The top comment probably isn't as important as it appears. When I read comments I usually read more than one.
I do think they could sometimes be more nicely phrased, taking into account that the author of the post being commented on will often read the critical comments, as opposed to only third party readers.
But generally I agree, as a reader the critical comments are often the more useful ones. Shortcomings of a post, pointers to existing products that already do what a given product does better (or at least differently), etc. are all useful things to know, even if I don't always agree with them. Whereas congratulations and statements of agreement are rarely that informative, unless they come with additional information expanding on the original post.
Part of the trickiness, imo, is that HN comments occupy an odd in-between space, between blog comments (which are clearly responding to the author on their own blog), and third-party mailing-list discussions about an article from outside the mailing list (which are typically not addressed to the author, and are for the benefit of the discussants).
Re: What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe some exuberant HN stories need a counterpoint and that's the purpose served by those negative #1 comments. The top comment probably isn't as important as it appears. When I read comments I usually read more than one.
The collapsing comments feature, of the chrome extension I use, has also helped me actually read through comments without getting side-tracked with endless pedantic debates. You can find a lot of good perspectives below the first thread.
Which extension is that? This sounds like a great feature. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether a lower comment is a new thread or part of the same one.
Re: What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
#24Thus Narcissus fell into the lake
Re: What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
#25...Your website crashes and you discover what memcache is for.
Memcache is used for storing binary data usually from web queries. This site was all static content.
Re: What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
#261. Your mom's comment was hilarious.
2. I agree with your point about the standard top comment on most Hacker News posts being contrarian. It can be very annoying, but having a strong dissenting voice also helps keep BS posts in check. I have noticed a lot more jokes as the top comments within posts though. I'm not sure if that's good or BSD. The first example that comes mind is a post titled 'You have a 0.000007% chance of becoming a billionaire'. The top rated comment was the common Reddit joke 'So you're saying I have a chance'.
Re: What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
#27It's ironic how this post is also number 1
Re: What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
#28For those of you who think you need a "good server" to be on the front page of hacker news, you're wrong. My blog hit #2 on HN and landed on the front page a few times in the last six months.
I have a Rackspace 256mb ram slice hosting Wordpress. No caching at all, none.
I also run, on the same server, a teamspeak server for a friend that still plays games.
I peaked at 290 simultaneous people reading my post. Teamspeak server was still working fine.
Re: What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The collapsing comments feature, of the chrome extension I use, has also helped me actually read through comments without getting side-tracked with endless pedantic debates. You can find a lot of good perspectives below the first thread.
Which extension is that? This sounds like a great feature. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether a lower comment is a new thread or part of the same one.
Right now I'm using HackerNew [1], made by tommoor.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...
Re: What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
#30I wrote http://gitignore.io and I saw a lot more traffic and traction by posting a link to my website in Reddit's /r/git than I did on Hacker News. Have you tried posting on different mediums and comparing the results?