Ask HN: Do You “Fire and Forget”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do You “Fire and Forget”?

3 pointsColinWright3 comments

I look at the "newest" page every day at unpredictable times, and reasonably often I see something that has a minor error that's easily fixable, or make a comment that I hope would enable the poster/author to enhance the item in some way.

Almost (but not quite always) invariably my comment goes unanswered, leading me to believe that either:

(a) my input is not as helpful as it is intended to be, or

(b) the poster/author isn't watching the submission.

There may be other options, but I'm wondering ... how many people here operate in "fire and forget" mode? The evidence suggests the proportion is substantial.

Another option is that those who are not in "F&F" mode fix things and I don't see the erroneous version, so there is some selection bias, but even so, I'm curious.

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That’s a good question. I think the comment making the correction is adequate, since this isn’t a “carved in stone” sort of media and those interested read the comments as well.

I’ll have something more to say about this when I finish my experiment here in “elder delurking”. One point that has come up is it is much more pleasant for the elderly to “fire and forget”, though this is more relevant for a posted comment than an original post. Little upside potential (who wants to be an 80 y.o. Influencer, nobody that old is interested in managing an online persona), and major downsides (you are all punk kids to us, even if you’re 50) to pursue a different strategy.

There's a lot of cruft on /new which I'm sure either has no humans behind it... or has someone doing nothing BUT spamming their domain's links every day. They don't care and they don't engage.

Flag, flag, flag...

Oh, I do flag when things are clearly spam, I leave alone things that are not clearly spam but which don't align with my interests, and I upvote things that I think add value to the site, even if I'm not especially interested in them.

But sometimes there are clear errors that can easily be fixed, and where fixing them would make the submission or content flow more easily, reducing the cognitive load on readers, and generally being an improvement.

I'm content with the concept of wabi sabi, but there are times when a small effort by the author reduces the load on all the readers ... I see the return on investment as worth it, and yet the authors rarely make the change.

Thus I think that many here are in "fire and forget" mode.

Which I find a little sad.

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