The Seduction of Bad Posts | Hacker News Reader

The Seduction of Bad Posts

onposting.substack.com

12 pointsluu8 comments

I don’t exactly understand the authors context, but on a personal level I just block and move on. There’s so much low quality content on twitter, and a bit of good quality as well. Therefore it only makes sense to just excise cancers like this instead of letting them fast track a blood pressure prescription.

Thank you. As someone starting a newsletter, it can be frustrating to get a few views for high quality content. Meanwhile its my basic tutorial that got to the front page of HN.

Obviously thats a different league, but I bet the temptation to get a "high score" feels the same. This post is a good reminder not to worry so much about the score, so thanks again

I have been noticing this for so long now. It happens on HN too in a different way. People piggyback on someone else's top comment to get attention for their unrelated reply.

On LinkedIn, people run connection farms. Someone asked about the specific word here yesterday.

In startup communities, it's appreciating each other to the extreme.

On Facebook, it's likes, shares and friend system.

On twitter, all of the above combined + people post anything popular for little bit of attention on the sad trending page, under popular people's tweet and so on.

On reddit, stealing content from a year before or two and repost.

On YouTube, reaction videos, stealing content and creating drama by attacking other youtubers.

Yep. Most people don't realize it, but each platform is a game. You have large masses of people who engage with the platform earnestly since they don't realize it's a game, but then you have a relatively small number who consciously or not have figured out how to "cheat" at the game using the strategies you've described. The payoff can be attention, a job, a book deal, or simply the satisfaction of making people mad online.

People piggyback on someone else's top comment to get attention for their unrelated reply.

Happens to top level submissions too. Lately I just avoid reading comments to “Show HN” submissions because they’re often a combination of either “here’s what I use instead” or “I’m writing my own version of the same thing”.

Which are fine but go make your own thread about it, gosh.

- - -

tiny voice inside my head: you see the irony, right?

me, in response: I regret nothing. But yes.

Maybe there will be something interesting in this newsletter in the future, but today, in this teaser post, there's nothing more than "there is a bad person on the Internet". Well, we knew that already.

This post is a month old; there have already been a number of follow-up pieces, some of which are linked at the bottom.

Them submit whichever of those is a good post for HN; this one isn't; it's got so little meat to it that it serves only as a Rorschach blob for people to project onto.

Later

I sort of enjoy Winkie's writing and he shares a lot of my politics, but, like, it's clear from reading the rest of these posts that this is a poor fit for HN.

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