A Message to the Hacker News Community | Hacker News Reader

A Message to the Hacker News Community

samputnam.com

1 pointSamPutnam5 comments

Vouching for this to say that pretty much every assumption in this post about Hacker News is completely wrong. Posts about consulting and "the little man" get upvoted all the time.

Also, I recommend reading the Guidelines/FAQ about what content is appropriate for the site, and also to not be personally offended if something does not get upvoted.

Max, while I appreciate your comment, I think you are the only one who saw it, because it is a showdead post. Do you have any tips to make this more gratifying to one's intellectual curiosity, so that it becomes unflagged?

It seems perfectly visible now; perhaps it got "lost" quickly by being posted midday and vanishing in the volume.

BTW, am I alone in finding prose formatted that way (center-justified with unnatural extra whitespace) particularly awkward to read?

I found the post problematic to read as well, given the formatting. The language is also needlessly verbose. That's something I personally struggle with when writing. I'm sympathetic, but that doesn't make it any easier to read.

As for the frustration the author feels, their behavior on HN hasn't been particularly constructive. The majority of their sparse activity has been primarily repeatedly posting the same self-promotional content from three different domains.

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=SamPutnam

From this piece:

> "I only speak for myself, but I do believe that Hacker News is for many the BATNA of programming communities and not one I can afford to leave."

They haven't contributing much to HN: while they may find HN valuable, they're not doing much to participate in a way that many HN members would appreciate. They specifically mention 'patio11, and rightly so. Besides posting a slew of valuable content on his blog, he's also been a valuable, active member of the HN community. That's a significant difference between 'patio11 and 'SamPutnam. A thoughtful post on the differences between consulting and programming is one thing, and something that I think would likely would be well-received: an outsider's rant on what's wrong with HN comes off poorly.

I second 'minimaxir's comment upthread, and encourage 'SamPutnam to spend more time participating in HN to better understand what works and what doesn't within it. HN is far from perfect, but I think it's got a lot going for it and the best way to make a difference is by helping make HN the place you want it to be through one's participation.

It was autokilled before I vouched for it.

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