
HN: The Good Parts (2017) - quickthrower2
https://danluu.com/hn-comments/
======
wiggler00m
PG's essay "What I've Learned From Hacker News"[0] is on point:

 _COMMENTS: Bad comments seem to be a harder problem than bad submissions.
While the quality of links on the frontpage of HN hasn 't changed much, the
quality of the median comment may have decreased somewhat.

There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. There
is a lot of overlap between the two—mean comments are disproportionately
likely also to be dumb—but the strategies for dealing with them are different.
Meanness is easier to control. You can have rules saying one shouldn't be
mean, and if you enforce them it seems possible to keep a lid on meanness.

Keeping a lid on stupidity is harder, perhaps because stupidity is not so
easily distinguishable. Mean people are more likely to know they're being mean
than stupid people are to know they're being stupid.

The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken
argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite
rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you
wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length
would be a good predictor. Probably the cause is human nature rather than
anything specific to comment threads. Probably it's simply that stupidity more
often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones.

Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to
write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of information it
conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny. The most
tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably
because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. So one advantage of
forbidding meanness is that it also cuts down on these.

Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more
effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone
submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if
someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region
around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.

Maybe the solution is to add a delay before people can respond to a comment,
and make the length of the delay inversely proportional to some prediction of
its quality. Then dumb threads would grow slower._

[0]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)

~~~
jaabe
I think the top submissions have declined somewhat over the years. Maybe it’s
just my personal taste that’s changed, but I like two types of articles. The
ones that are interesting and the ones that are actually useful to me. There
is still a lot of interesting articles on HN, that diver story from yesterday
is a great example of one. It’s rare I see an article that’s actually useful
though. Google cloud being down, and google engineers explaining what was
going one is one of the few useful thing I’ve seen on HN in 2019. (And that
actually mainly involved the comment section).

I realise that you will always get a lot of hype-technologies on a technology
focused social media, but they are actually not that interesting to me. Sure
Rust is cool, but chances are that I won’t actually ever meet someone who uses
Rust professionally in my lifetime. This frankly makes the majority of Rust
related content rather irrelevant to me, and I say Rust, but I could be
mentioning a range of the other cool, new and not-adopted technologies. Now,
I’m not saying that those articles shouldn’t be here, because I think they
absolutely should. It’s obviously more news-worthy to write about something
new and cool, rather than something old and tried. When the majority, or all,
the content is made up of technologies that will probably never see real world
adoption, however, well then HN becomes somewhat irrelevant, at least to me.
Maybe that means I’m just on the wrong web-page though.

------
tedsanders
I'd like to take this moment to highlight the contributions of HN user
philipkglass. Their comments on energy-related articles are always well
informed and well explained.

------
zoeysaurusrex
I used to really love HN for the good parts. Even back when I first started
lurking, you would see waves of mean and incorrect comments, but it ebbed at
times. These days the good stuff seems to be getting drowned out more and
more. It feels like the polarization of discussion based social media is
finally consuming this place like a cancer. I’ll always love the things I
learn here, but I’m driven away from the discussions more and more.

------
youeseh
That intro leaves much to be desired in terms of inviting the reader to what
comes after it.

~~~
kevintb
Why, the intro perfectly describes a comment such as this one :-)

~~~
youeseh
Which part of the intro? Was my comment mean? Was it wrong?

~~~
azangru
It was short ;-)

 _(Oh, sorry, it was the quote in the top comment that warned against short
comments)_

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BrendanD
I have only lurked here for a few years, but from the beginning it seemed to
me that the HN zeitgeist is slightly sociopathic. It does not stop me from
lurking, however, perhaps because it is one of the last bastions of text only
web.

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pjc50
This reminds me, I was planning to extract my own most-highly-voted comments
and see if I could make some sort of book or longform piece out of them.

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zhte415
Do you put comment licensing in your profile? I do.

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hendi_
Yes, comments on HN are mostly a time waste or even total garbage, as are
comments everywhere else.

BUT, there's the occasional nugget hidden in that pool of filth that makes it
worth digging through :-)

~~~
hutzlibu
So how would you judge your comment by that metric? To me it seems you just
repeated what OP said many times without adding something new.

~~~
SeanDav
>> _So how would you judge your comment by that metric? To me it seems you
just repeated what OP said many times without adding something new._

One could say exactly the same thing about this comment - and the one I am
making right now. Comments about comments should be kept to the bare minimum
as they invite flame wars and add noise.

~~~
hutzlibu
I know. That was, what I was pointing out. Complaining about bad comments with
a bad comment, while feeling superior.

... so did my comment raise the bar? I don't know. It maybe made the poster
thinking. Because what bothers me actually much more than a non expertise
comment is a snarky elitist comment, failing to see their own ignorance.

Maybe because I was a lot like that. I am very smart. But I know (now) that I
can be very stupid as well.

------
alanh
dan, please set max-width: 40em; on your content. It's unreadable as-is. I
will read this later on Pocket.

~~~
birracerveza
You can use reader mode if your browser supports it. But I agree.

~~~
saagarjha
FWIW, I immediately enabled Reader Mode in my browser and was _very_ confused
when the topic of the article changed abruptly because I was running into the
other articles on the page.

------
dosy
Most HN comments are gratuitously mean or incorrect, but it has good technical
comments.

This is so true. Posting work I've done on Show HN is like going back to an
abusive relationship with someone who just wants to crush, dismiss and
ridicule every creative thing you ever did or wanted to do.

I've spent a lot of (necessary, but still feels wasted) time getting over the
trauma of commenters on Show HN and their cruelty. I find their comments
contribute to the self-doubt inner narrative I have and I hate that,
particularly the idea that some random abusive person on the internet can
influence your future choices by convincing you you are stupid, or your work
is bad or whatever. But I consider I just have to find my own way to get
stronger about this and to somehow be resilient to that. Because people are
like that every where you go.

In processing this emotional/comment abuse trauma, I also have spent quite a
lot of time thinking about what makes each person say something mean, when
they could have pointed out something in a considerate way. I think the path
to become an abusive HN commenter is different for each person who goes that
way, but one thing I think must be behind it is people who feel crushed, or
dismissed creatively themselves, and wanting to perpetrate that on other
people as a substitute for making something themselves. It's common that the
meanest commenters don't have any "submissions" or at least no personal "this
is something I did" submissions.

Creative communities don't have to be like this. OpenProcessing, Glitch are
some very supportive places I've seen for creative work. IndieHackers, Product
Hunt, the same. Here it seems that the community "tolerates" this behavior and
possibly views it as some sort of sport or entertainment, as unhealthy as that
is. I'm not dissing entertainment like that, it has its place, I just
wish/expect it were not here.

But that leads to a second theory I have about abusive commenters, that this
is a "tech" or engineer thing, and not a creative person thing. Tech has an
asshole problem, and maybe there's correlation between people who are
technically good, but emotionally abusive or lacking in empathy.

I find often mean comments are disguised as not, to give the abuser an "out"
or plausible deniability. So they get to perpetrate their cruelty under a
cover of just being helpful, or whatever.

Anyone want to share some strategies they have for processing this trauma in
an efficient way, or some strong responses they have for it?

~~~
hutzlibu
Well, you should be aware that a lot of people who spend a lot of time on HN
are bitter, because their own ideas did not flourish and they are stuck in a
mediocre job, so wandering on HN and alike to get inspirational spirit, but
with jealousy, so not eager to love new things at first sight, but to smash
them. But they are also able to applaud something if they love it.

So of course it is possible that your work is not the best, if random internet
strangers can crush it easily.

I found HN to be a much nicer place than most other places on the internet,
but still, you should not expect anonymous people to be nice. Not in this
internet, not in this world with all its freaky, unhappy people. Happy people
usually have other things to tend to, that makes them happy, than posting all
the time. So don't take it too personal. View it as a challenge and don't try
to please a internetmob.

~~~
klez
> you should be aware that a lot of people who spend a lot of time on HN are
> bitter, because their own ideas did not flourish and they are stuck in a
> mediocre job, so wandering on HN and alike to get inspirational spirit, but
> with jealousy

That's quite an assumption, don't you think?

~~~
hutzlibu
Yes it is. And I know, I got no data to back it up, just experience and logic.
And yes, there are some people who really like to post a lot here and enjoy
it. But they are the exception.

