

Ask HN: How can I make better comments? - zitterbewegung

Some of the comments on HN have been degrading slightly over my time on HN. I was wondering if there was a general method of how to create good an insightful comments on HN.
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gojomo
Minimize. Don't say 'great article' or 'great comment'; use an upvote. Avoid
cliches of phrase and thought, especially emotionally-charged cliches.

Details from hard-won personal experience are always good. Armchair intuitions
and snap judgments, rarely.

Use the 'delay' setting, set for a few minutes, and reread your comment just
as the delay is expiring. Fix typos and problems with clarity at any time, but
avoid adding or removing substantive points without acknowledgment --
especially if there are replies.

Read others' comments charitably. Think, "In what way could this make sense?",
rather than "Aha, gotcha!" (Obsessively finding trivial bugs in code is a
virtue; in conversation, it's rude.)

Also, read _articles_ charitably and considerate of their original context. A
mood piece, a blog post, a popular-media account, etc. is written by an author
with certain goals and for an imagined audience. To savage such an article
because, once removed from its original context, it doesn't meet other
standards or please some other alien audience is cheap, empty, artificial
controversialism.

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siong1987
I found that the best way to submit a good comment is to edit your comment at
least 3 times. Anyway, I found that this feature is a bit annoying especially
some people edit their comments straight after someone replies to the comment.

Sometimes, I even see some replies are totally unrelated to the comment
because the commentor change the comment after people put replies to the
comment.

And, never write a reply that is against PG if you want to keep your karma
point high. Some people will downvote your reply blindly.

~~~
tokenadult
"never write a reply that is against PG if you want to keep your karma point
high."

Really? I'd expect pg himself, at least, to upvote a comment that gets him to
think. I don't think I've tried yet the experiment of disagreeing with him
directly. I'll observe the results if I do.

To answer the main question, I like comments that grapple with the main point
of the post or comment to which they are replying, and especially comments
that link out to useful resources on the same or a related subject.

A kind of comment I would like to see more of, a kind I have posted but don't
get a lot of upvotes from, is asking a question along the lines of "How could
we find out more about the facts of this issue?" or "What is the significance
of this statement and its importance?" (You can see specific examples in the
listing of my comments with low upvote totals. :) ) I really would like to
know from the smart people here how they gather and evaluate evidence and how
they make social policy trade-offs among competing interests.

~~~
jamesbritt
"Really? I'd expect pg himself, at least, to upvote a comment that gets him to
think."

Perhaps a better general version is, "Criticize the content of a comment, not
the writer or their style."

'A kind of comment I would like to see more of, a kind I have posted but don't
get a lot of upvotes from, is asking a question along the lines of "How could
we find out more about the facts of this issue?" or "What is the significance
of this statement and its importance?" '

From time to time I like to ask how someone happens to know whatever it is
they are claiming. It does not seem tot be a popular question, though.

~~~
trapper
Agreed. I come from a medical background and we have to back everything with
evidence. Even though it's computer science, most opinions of software guys
tend to be backed up by blog posts or group think unfortunately. I am not sure
how many people even read citeseer!

Case in point: has there been any research touting the effectiveness of agile
methods? What effect does pair programming have on productivity? Most opinions
on the subject I have ever read haven't even looked, they just use anecdote
and groupthink as their evidence. It's like listening to supplement pushers.

