I agree with all of that. The defensiveness that comes with writing for HN (and Twitter) makes me a worse writer too. It's not just about being careful and precise, but about being super defensive to avoid the most uncharitable possible reading.
Perhaps more unfortunately, I find that writing for academic conferences and journals makes me a worse writer too. It's different, but having to laser focus on 'selling' the paper throughout the paper makes it hard to communicate. Many of my favorite CS papers could never be published in a 'good' journal or conference today. Good research writing is really hard, but it seems like the publication process makes it harder, not easier.
> being super defensive to avoid the most uncharitable possible reading.
Had my eyes opened recently by just how wild people can get with their inferences. Defense is impossible when you're asserting X, but also have to explicitly assert the entire universe of not-X.
At least a bad faith signal makes it easy to bail from the discussion. Seemingly-honest, good faith confusion is somehow worse due to the obligation to clarify.
It's difficult, 1000 people can see what you wrote and it just takes one to misunderstand or jump to conclusions. That will motivate someone to respond (to feel self-righteous or helpful) more than someone agreeing with what you say. To me it's just the physics of a message board and you have to accept that reality while not taking it all too seriously.
For every comment I’ve written here and clicked reply, I’ve written 10x more and just closed the tab. But that’s okay. Usually someone makes my point better than I ever could anyway.
I love the HN crowd for the intelligent discourse. It reminds me of reddit in its heyday. But goddamn, I've never met a crowd as critical and prone to buzzkill. Everyone's so damn serious here.
I’m in the middle of writing a series of security articles on my blog and a couple of people have told me that some of them are too long.
They are long because I was trying to be thorough, but more so I was trying to make sure I pre-addressed all of the arguments I knew would come (particularly in my enterprise DMARC deployment article).
I realize that what the author talks about here is part of why I do that.
Very much so. Write first for yourself. Write to your own standard of quality. A borrowed standard is one never fully understood, nor knowingly achieved.
Imo, as long as you organize your writing elegantly, it doesn't matter how long the final product is.
As a reader, I really appreciate the table of contents.
Maybe what your friends meant was that your piece was too long without a table of contents, from which they could jump to a place for reference, or skip it because they were already familiar with the material.
> Should you explicitly forestall likely misinterpretations? Yes, if they're misinterpretations a reasonably smart and well-intentioned person might make. In fact it's sometimes better to say something slightly misleading and then add the correction than to try to get an idea right in one shot. That can be more efficient, and can also model the way such an idea would be discovered.
> But I don't think you should explicitly forestall intentional misinterpretations in the body of an essay. An essay is a place to meet honest readers. You don't want to spoil your house by putting bars on the windows to protect against dishonest ones. The place to protect against intentional misinterpretations is in end-notes. But don't think you can predict them all. People are as ingenious at misrepresenting you when you say something they don't want to hear as they are at coming up with rationalizations for things they want to do but know they shouldn't. I suspect it's the same skill.
> I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on everything I wrote, regardless of what it was.
And this is one reason I've been resistant to identifying with nerd / hacker culture for a long time. Everytime I encountered it it was often just a pissing contest about things anyone could easily look up and prove both the arguing assholes were both wrong / right as often was the case.
I block google.com and subdomains. Surprisingly, it doesn't do much collateral damage.
I do have one exception: I whitelist youtube-ui.l.google.com. As much as I hate Google, everyone on earth posts their video to Youtube, and invidious is too janky to replace it. I hope I live long enough to see a world where humanity has found a more ethical video repository than Google.
I think it's fine for an author to attempt to exclude some readers/virality.
In general I sense a lot of HN-hate, and I get it: HN comments can be pedantic, can be know-it-all, can be Silicon Valley centric, and supports threading which often leads to bickering or uninteresting low-value tangents.
I... ignore threads that don't interest me or that seem overly confident.
I don't understand why stereotyping and hating happens, but it isn't new.
I think the fundamental truth is ~80% of discussion is personal anecdotes. This has a very strong appeal because you can make whatever you want from it, you can validate your own opinions or dismiss it off hand. Intellectual validation a la carte.
If you look at most of the submissions over the past year and a half, most of them appear to come from 2 submitters who are in the HN top 10, often posting the same link more than once. (many of the most prolific submitters spam the site with 20-30 links per day, and I assume they make the rounds to many of the typical sites we see here often when farming karma)
The point about the effects defensive writing has on writing quality resonates. Writing is a big part of my work and I've begun to realise that I write defensively - spending time couching things in a context, inserting caveats everywhere, going on asides to deal with potential challenges - it makes for a terribly long and meandering read, whatever point I had to make buried beneath shields of parentheses and moats of footnotes.
Unfortunately, I don't see how to escape it, at least for me that's just the nature of the work.
Also I use NoScript so the redirect didn't work for me.
Did he disable it for this article? Because I got through without doing anything unusual.
But also: I don't really get why he'd want to do that. I read the article, and I get his complaints, but they don't really seem to have anything to do with other people reading his site. They sound like reasons for _him_ to not post to and engage on HN, not reasons to try to stop people coming from HN from reading his site. His site doesn't seem to have comments, so why does it matter who reads it? I really must be missing something.
At least it's a bit nicer than JWZ (whose car got cut off by some techbro once) does. His site (not linked to obviously) displays a rude image if it detects a HN link incoming.
This does make me curious about the pattern of upvoting. It seems likely that usually people upvote without clicking on the referral link first, but I wonder what the percentage is.
For the record I have macwright.com as well as the top upvoted HN links in my RSS feed.
Interesting, even "Open link in private tab" (ff mobile) gets the redirect. I'd been assuming that that wouldn't send a referer. I suppose it probably doesn't ignore the "ping" attribute either...
I’ve thought about writing an extension to hide the top comment on every article because it’s often a pedantic disagreement with whatever the article is about, but not always (like in this case).
I do totally agree that the best writing comes not when you’re trying to build the ultimate defense against takedowns, but when you can express yourself more creatively.
Things I learned today. Apparently, opening a link in a new tab doesn't set the referring host domain. [discovered by, opening story in a new tab and wondering what the author meant]
I imagine in the next few years the referer header will just be blanked out always when crossing to a new domain. I believe the path was removed already.
Sick dude. The commentary on this website is often kind of lame and I've found that lots of people who frequent it make the mistake of trying to pre-empt middle-brow comments. Don't do that. Write for those who get you.
Overly pedantic intentional misunderstandings pervade comments here and if you react to those by trying to defend against them you weaken yourself. Love it!
I've got a script on a few of my sites. Initially, the redirect is off. If it passes 100 incoming hits from HN in an hour, I assume it's on the front page. Then I just do some messy scripting to re-enable the script for a few minutes every hour. One minute on, seven minutes off. That sort of thing. Basically, the goal is to redirect the maximum number of people, and you can't do that if it redirects everyone. No, I won't be sharing these scripts with anyone but mostly because they're all terrible kludges that do not deserve to see the light of day.
Here’s what the author, Tom MacWright, has to say about it (which you can read on his blog, as long as you don’t click on a link from here):
“If you’re lucky, you end up being good at a few things. If you’re really lucky, those are also the things you like doing. I’m good at writing articles that get upvoted and discussed on Hacker News, or news.ycombinator.com. But I don’t like it.
Writing on the internet can be a two-way thing, a learning experience guided by iteration and feedback. I’ve learned some bad habits from Hacker News. I added Caveats sections to articles to make sure that nobody would take my points too broadly. I edited away asides and comments that were fun but would make articles less focused. I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on everything I wrote, regardless of what it was.
Writing for the Hacker News audience makes my writing worse.
I don’t like what Hacker News has become – or a lot of the web, for that matter. But I’m part of the discourse. I’ve written critical articles, mean tweets, silly comments, the whole lot of it. It’s impossible to separate one thing from another and neatly place blame. But it’s simple to notice a thing you want less of and turn it off.
So I can flex the freedom of an independent blog by embracing what seems good and pushing away what I don’t like. Redirecting Hacker News links away from this website makes sense to me. Traffic to this website doesn’t pay my bills. Disengaged readers just looking for a hot take don’t return to my site, or recognize me when I write something else, or write blog posts of their own and bring new creativity to the indie web.
Maybe posts will be less viral (I can hear, as I write that, someone writing “you haven’t written a hit in years, Tom!”), but writing viral posts or maximizing hits wasn’t my goal when I set out and it isn’t now.
Anyway, the RSS feed works great. The HTML site works pretty well. I tweet most new articles I write. Business as usual, just less of the orange site.”
Perhaps more unfortunately, I find that writing for academic conferences and journals makes me a worse writer too. It's different, but having to laser focus on 'selling' the paper throughout the paper makes it hard to communicate. Many of my favorite CS papers could never be published in a 'good' journal or conference today. Good research writing is really hard, but it seems like the publication process makes it harder, not easier.