Hacker News Reader

Comment by purplecats | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?”

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)

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.

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.

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