Best of HN 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Best of HN 2020

hn.algolia.com

191 pointsrichardboegli21 comments

I'm happy to see that there's a "Thank you Dang" in the top 20. He certainly deserves that praise... I am still amazed at how good this community is, despite having grown into a much larger one over the years.

im still puzzled by the seeming contradiction that sites can get ddosed from traffic from hacker news, yet the comment sections nor the average votes accumulation on posts seem to reflect the size of the community that such a traffic would warrant.

Pure speculation but could it be a network effect? I frequently visit websites that were shared by coworkers and friends over text communicators that they originally found on HN.

Obviously, not all people vote or comment either so that's a second multiplicative factor.

Finally, causation != correlation, which most likely is your point, e.g. things on HN already spread from somewhere else.

There’s definitely a network effect. I had a post of mine do well on here which lead to a ton of mentions on Twitter and LinkedIn. There was probably more going on but I don’t run analytics on the site so can only make educated guesses as to where stuff was being shared.

I would imagine the amount of people who engage with the content is much smaller than the amount of people who have not logged in and just read the site. As usual, only small portion of any site’s users are the active kind of.

This is likely, I'd say it's due to the 90–9–1 rule[0] which states that the vast majority of your users would be lurkers, a small proportion would participate in discussions and the smallest number being the power users who generate most of the content on the platform

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

I’m curious as to why others behave this way for any discernible pattern to emerge. I’m more likely to comment on Reddit as opposed to on HN because I sort of make a quick simulation of how it will be received. Depending on my mood and whether I have an idea, if there’s a higher chance I’ll be downvoted, I’m more likely to refrain from participating.

HN is brutal when it comes to comments, not as harsh as StackOverflow, but the probabilities of a comment being received well here are so low. To me, the expectations generally seem to be that: individuals are discussing in good faith, the comment is not “booby trapped” to intentionally cause a negative emotional response, the poster has taken some non-negligible amount of time to form their thought or they are clearly versed in the topic (ie use the correct lingo, etc), any tinge of a political perspective leans libertarian, etc. Those are some of the factors I use to judge whether I should post a comment on HN.

On Reddit, the filter is “is my thought hilarious” or “I can significantly improve the direction of this conversation by participating.” On StackOverflow, my filter is, “has any other human that’s ever used SO ever wondered what I’m about to ask?”

I love this part of it. On reddit, any comment I make is usually drowned out by noise and missed (unless I'm on a smaller or local subreddit or something). Here, I can genuinely engage in interesting discussions with people.

I kind of understand: I started reading in 2011 and didn't register until years later, mostly because I'd just click the links that looked interesting. Theres really no reason to register unless you feel like commenting IMO, which probably accounts for the apparent lack of upvotes.

Probably because of the 1% rule(Internet culture)[1]

> stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk

Currently there's a topic on the front page discussing this in detail titled - 'Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600274

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

Are votes on HN 1-to-1 with activity, or at least roughly linear? I know Reddit scales votes based on the subreddit's popularity, but I always thought seeing posts with 4000 votes seemed suspiciously low. Certainly this site _feels_ like it's busier.

> I am still amazed at how good this community is, despite having grown into a much larger one over the years.

HN is pretty good, but there are still issues with conspiracy theories, get rich quick schemes, etc. that get traction in low visibility posts.

HN's moderation team is incredible.

I asked them in email to delete a comment of mine from 2019 which had personally identifying information.

They replied the same day (that too, on christmas week). Read the comment, and asked if they were fine with just removing the Personal info and keeping the the rest of the comment as they thought it added some value.

That's a degree of care towards yours content that I didn't think exists in 2020. HN is an oasis in desert that is the social media driven internet.

Interestingly, none of the top posts have been about COVID, which has been arguably the biggest event of 2020 (the only thing that is related is the Twitter work forever from home announcement).

I would guess many COVID stories that could be big were submitted, upvoted, and quickly flagged because they were deemed out of scope.

If they were not flagged, perhaps one or two could have been among the top 10. But even then I wouldn't be sure about that.

For comparison, "Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967) was among the top posts and not flagged, because of its historical significance (per dang's comment there). I don't think COVID was less significant, but there was no obvious point in time to focus among many related stories spanning over months, unlike the presidential election that had a single victory moment.

That's true, but, if you venture into page 2, the #22 story of this year was about the death of John Conway.

The most interesting Covid posts were in February. One was about how China was running the largest remote work experiment the world had ever seen. Ominous stuff if you go back and read it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22221507

Curated Coronavirus discussions from the beginning of the year is pure history, good stuff to examine a moment in time.

Probably because the covid issue evolved gradually. First we knew that something was happening in China but couldn't tell what it was exactly, then we realized it was a decease but didn't know how bad, then there was the lockdown but information from China is regulated so no big story here, and then it hit Europe and all hell broke loose. The thing is that there wasn't a singular event that would have captured all of our attention catapulting it to the top of HN.

> which has been arguably the biggest event of 2020

Who’s arguing against that?

If you go into the "Biden wins White House..." thread, there's actually quite a lot about COVID, seeing how political it became.

> This page will only work with JavaScript enabled

Thanks for warning.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16191843

Reply on news.ycombinator.com