Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I second Dan's advice of blogging more.

I'm a very average HN commenter. I do put in effort in writing here, trying to be civil above all and sharing my experience where it could be of interest. But I'm not Alan Kay, I've never rewritten a distributed deep learning system in Haskell using a genetically optimized Paxos consensus protocol, and my entrepreneurial experience is a loose string of "don't do this" case studies at best... So my comments certainly won't make anyone's "Best of HN" list.

Last week, after the news broke that Salesforce walked away from buying Twitter, I was about to write a HN comment about what Twitter could do. The text got long enough that I decided to expand it into a Medium post instead: https://medium.com/swlh/twitter-could-be-the-next-mozilla-e7...

To my surprise, the post has 28,000 views and 755 recommends so far. If I had written it as a HN comment, it would have got maybe 5-10 upvotes and perhaps spawned a short discussion thread about how unrealistic my idea was. (Please don't bother to criticize the content of the blog post in replies here -- I'm just using it as an example of blog vs. comment.)

I love reading HN discussions... But maybe there could be a site that slots between the HN and Medium formats, and lets you expand your comment into a blog post with minimal friction? Call it "HN Long-Form" or whatever. Ideally it would interface with the HN comment system so that you could mark your comment with something like "Promote to long-form" after you've written it. That would create an editable post on the long-form site. You could then later expand your comment there, and publish it on the long-form comment aggregator site. (Maybe I should just build this myself and see if it feels right.)

> I'm a very average HN commenter.

An 11k karma is not average IMHO. You're way above average HN commentator.

I think that you just used the best tool for the job. That doesn't really mean anything about comments. You read what I consider low level comments and high level comments on technical and social subjects from the SAME nickname all the time at HN.

> An 11k karma is not average IMHO. You're way above average HN commentator.

I don't know if that is true. I had an equally high comment number and I reset it. My feeling is that there are others that do that as well.

You can get upvotes any number of ways [1] putting out correct and admirable info is only one of them.

Likewise you can loose karma by simply mentioning a third rail issue or not fawning when the community (on a particular post) [2] is fawning.

[1] For example I tend to upvote the parent threads of my comments. That way my comment has a better chance of being seen is my theory. (Doesn't matter if I am correct since I am pointing out what I do and it's reasonable to think that others might do the same.)

[2] And this is important. You can say the same type of thing on one comment thread and be downvoted but be upvoted on another.

I've been on the site since 2008 IIRC, so I've had plenty of time to accumulate karma.

I completely agree.

In 2009 I got a brief 15 minutes of internet fame through a incredibly badly written essay about... a thing (not relevant here). Seven years later it's still one of the most popular pages on my website, although luckily it's been eclipsed by better content.

If I spent half the time writing more blog content (aargh, my last entry was 2015) than I do here, I'd have a really nice corpus of work. Which people might read!

I have seen a tool which allows a HN thread to be used as a comment on a external blog post --- it came up a few weeks back. I don't know if this worked by screen-scraping HN itself or whether there's an API, but either way it suggests that your idea would work.

> If I spent half the time writing more blog content (aargh, my last entry was 2015) than I do here, I'd have a really nice corpus of work. Which people might read!

I think everyone feels like that sometimes when writing long comment, the problem is all the mental burden that comes with trying to structure a blog post. Another thing is that a blog needs to have a theme or be subject specific otherwise it drowns in the oceans of interwebs.

There's also the burden necessary to recontextualize. A comment on HN has at least an article's worth of context and possibly a thread of comments it is in reply to. Any attempt to sideline that into a longer blog post needs to spend "set up time" to contextualize the blog post. Certainly one can start such blog every time with HN links and big blockquotes of text that one is responding too, but such easy approaches tend to invite the question "Why wasn't this just a comment in HN?" To do things right you have to write a proper opening establishing the context through paraphrasing as much as linking/quoting, and that certainly can be a lot more effort than just commenting on HN.

One day, I intend to scrape all my HN comments, and turn the best ones into blog posts (if still relevant) :-)

I want to start blogging, but I'm concerned about giving control of my content to a third party. At the same time, I can't be bothered to register my own domain (mainly due to the herculean task of finding a decent name).

One relatively easy option is to use Jekyll on GitHub Pages. You can eventually CNAME your own domain to it. The content is in a git repo you can easily clone and take with you somewhere else such as Netlify or other hosts that compete in this space, if/when your needs change.

Octopress!

Yes, I have sometimes thought too that some of my longer comments on HN could be expanded into a blog entry quite easily. Unfortunately, I don't have a blog to publish it on and I don't consider it worth the hassle getting one.

As someone who has done this a few times, LongForm sounds like a great idea.

hey this is a great blog post! I was around during those times and totally forgot how all those deals went down. And I wish you were an average HN commenter. Reality is probably more like top 5% :)

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