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Comment by rosalinekarr | Hacker News Reader

> I still haven't managed to crack Hacker News, though. Tough audience.

Just link a bunch of studies to anything you say.[^1] It doesn't actually matter if they're related.[^2] No one really checks the sources anyway.[^3]

[^1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.02876

[^2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02728

[^3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.03799

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Haha no way. My highest rated posts have all been some vapid feel-good thing that I posted shortly after an article was submitted to HN. My detailed explanations that link to studies rarely get more than 10 points (same phenomenon occurs on Quora as well actually...)

I always wonder how much these factors affect a comment's score:

* Proximity to the top of the page

* Time of day posted

* Number of sibling comments and the score of those comments

On reddit, for example, it seems impossible to get noticed once there are already a few highly-upvoted replies to the comment you're replying to.

I've been kicking myself that I didn't take sociology in university to study conversational dynamics on threaded internet forums. It continues to fascinate me

This hasn't been true for me.

My top 3 posts [0, 1, 2] are all fairly trite. All three of these were rated much higher than posts with extensive citations.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13538068

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13441744

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13594765

Edited:

This post already has a higher score than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180432 which has five citations.

Compare this low-effort comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124411

to these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14149200

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14016438

Getting "in" when a post has few comments and is going to attract a lot of comment readership quickly or stay on the frontpage for a while is probably more important than pure comment quality.

Absolutely true, and especially problematic because by their nature high-quality comments will take more time to formulate and therefore always be late to the party and get less visibility.

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