On: Some tactics for writing in public

[karaterobot]

My rules for HN:

* Assume the person responding to you hasn't read the article, and has only briefly scanned your comment while mentally composing their reply.

* Anything abstract is going to get misunderstood; keep it concrete but vague.

* There is no consistent relationship between quality of a comment and how people respond to it.

* You can write a reply and then erase it without sending, and that's the best thing to do in most cases.

* When in doubt, collapse the thread and move on.

[samwillis → karaterobot]

This is a good list.

> You can write a reply and then erase it without sending, and that's the best thing to do in most cases.*

I do this maybe as much as 1/4 comments.

I would also add:

- Don't get into a back and fourth with a single other user, it's generally boring and goes nowhere.

- Don't rise to it if someone is trying to start an argument.

- Be generous, assume you are misunderstanding an apparent negative comment.

- Be complimentary, it makes peoples day.

[iamflimflam1 → karaterobot]

You can write a reply and then erase it without sending, and that's the best thing to do in most cases.

Reminds me of a time I’d written a huge email - can’t remember now what had got me riled up. I showed it to a colleague to proof read and he just said “there’s only want way to improve this” and promptly hit the delete button…

[Zetice → karaterobot]

Eh, too cynical for my tastes.

If you need a list like this, I think a more productive thing you can do is work on is building up resilience to online discourse, usually by reducing ego.

It’ll enable you to take more things at face value, which in turn will expose you to a wider variety of viewpoints.

HN isn’t special, I’m not special, nobody owes me the time it would take to craft a quality response, and expecting or demanding something from strangers usually ends up in disappointment.

[bachmeier → karaterobot]

> You can write a reply and then erase it without sending, and that's the best thing to do in most cases.

Sometimes I do this, but more commonly I will write my comment and then just not check that discussion ever again. I only check the discussion if it's a situation where I am willing to engage if there is a response. My experience has been that replies to any comment that's even mildly controversial are such that the other party will not bother trying to understand what I'm saying. In many cases I might be posting a piece of data (with a link to the source) and inevitably someone's going be upset because they don't like the data.

[mixedmath → karaterobot]

I agree with these rules. I would add:

* Always assume that no one will reply to a comment. Threads of comments are at most loosely based on a theme.

[justin_oaks → mixedmath]

Sometimes it's more disappointing to have nobody reply to a comment than for someone to respond negatively.

And yet it's very common to get no replies to any given comment. And that fact in itself is a common reason for people not to reply. Because it's likely nobody will reply to them!