Top Hacker News commenters of 2021
whaly.io
whaly.io
You're talking about probability of upvote, but that needs to be multiplied by the number of people who read the comment, and that depends heavily on where it is on the comment page itself. When I look at my karma on my recent comments they have very little to do with how much time I spent on them or how unique my perspective is... I even wonder if that aspect is gameable sometimes, whether you could guess the probability that with your upvote a comment that has been recently posted 5 minutes ago could be boosted above the top comment posted 5 hours ago, and if the 15 minute ago one was interesting enough maybe it would be self-sustaining up there, and you could potentially produce the second comment in the page by replying to it. But that's a lot of math when probably if you're trying to optimize karma/comment there are better heuristics, “always comment on any post that is on the front page with < 20 points and < 20 comments” or so, just increasing volume of things that are probably in the right place to be upvoted.
For me it's a sign that I need to change something at work, I often flee here because I am making powerpoints, I'd never do it so much if I was writing code more often. At least, that is what I believe.
HN does give me back a lot though: Being understood, by like minded people, confirmation of my opinions that are just too different from my group of friends (none have ever for example installed Linux, or tried to run their own cloud services). I feel at home here. It could be called addiction, it's also just finding a community where you can express thoughts you can't express anywhere else, and expect to have interactions based on those thoughts. I've often changed my mind or apologized for being a dick here, I don't want to be banned but I want to validate and invalidate my believes and it works for me, I hope I provide value for others as well. Maybe I have an HN shaped hole in my heart?
In any event, it's been worth it and it's been a job well done.
Also, I'm surprised and a bit ashamed to be #415 in this list. That's probably a whole side-project's worth of time I could have spent elsewhere. But I guess we all need somewhere to commune, talk shop, make friends or blow off some steam. FWIW I've learned far more from HN in the last year than I've been able to bring to it, and I'm thankful for the avenues it leads me down every day as a reader. I would post a lot less if I stopped drinking but, yeah.
I recognize an hyperbole when I see one, but this one is kinda of a big one.
Even the people who disagree with you here are polite. There are your occasional reddit-style "cool" sounding snarky comments every now and then. But decent overall
There are literally millions of forums out there.
On any topic.
Even simply statistically speaking, there's a ton like that.
But does this make HN truly unique?
I don't think it does.
If the OP said "among the forums I'm in HN is the only one that ..." I'd have nothing to object.
Though the psychology part of r/science is too much, much less scientific and more biased to a political view
I'm sure he does, and I don't know. But that way lies every other site on the internet...
How long do you think it would take to write that? How good do you think your trainees would be in the real world? Or would it just be better to have someone go live in the world for a long time?
If so... doesn't that mean it's a rarely acquired skill?
"humblebrag, transitive + intransitive: to make a seemingly modest, self-critical, or casual statement or reference that is meant to draw attention to one's admirable or impressive qualities or achievements" -- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humblebrag
upvoted, btw. Thanks for making me wonder what kind of asshole I am.
I don't think its assholery to make a legit brag or to bow to tall poppy syndrome. I think it's sad that the bow to the all too human neurosis has become required by etiquette.
There is a lot of stealth censorship on HN that occurs behind the scenes. After I wrote a post that was critical of Stripe, all of my new posts are automatically shadow banned. This place won’t survive for much longer, I don’t think.
Edit: And before dang posts some dumb response, I will tell you that he said “the algorithm” decided that my posts were “self promotion.” Anyway, maybe this is a good way of ending my commenting on this forum — time to help those who want to create something new.
Actually, there are multiple admins. See his response to my question here [0].
That's, of course, not to distract from his great work; as I've stated multiple times already, I really think HN is one of the best moderated communities overall.
I also prefer to keep the guideline commentary separate from any other matter so as not to dilute the message.
More useful is knowing
* What were 2021's most upvoted articles?
* Wat were 20201's most upvoted comments?
- [1] https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...
And here: https://app.whaly.io/hacker-news/public/report/3596f39c-5a56...
Sometimes I break my vow of online detoxing before sleeping; when I find trending topics related to my domain of knowledge, I frantically respond before the comment section gets too crowded. On the other hand, I can think through more diligently during my noontime, but my effort towards quality commenting is not met by karma from otherwise asleep HNers. It seems like reaping karma is not just about knowing the subject well, but being in the right place at the right time(zone).
The top 20 percent represent 1519843 of the total comments, or just over half (55.56 percent).
Though at the top 2k, you're still writing 359 comments per year which is a lot, so I guess the real list going down to comment count = 1 might look a lot more like an 80/20 split.
Would love to know the distribution by karma as well, yeah.
Maybe that would better highlight what I really enjoy with HN: A story about aviation and suddenly 4 airline pilots appear and share insight, or when some tech legend dies and several colleagues pop in and tell stories about them. Or like the other day when one of the authors of the BLAKE3 algorithm (?) participated in some friendly flame-waring.
A lot can be written while waiting for an incremental build to compile
Thanks for all the substantive entertainment everyone
(Though yes I should probably be more conservative with my comments)
While it seems like a boring manual job, it’s an interesting job if looked at as an automation problem. The need to automate in a non-stupid way would be good to apply here.
Near the end of the list, it’s sitting at around a hundred accounts for each number, yet 70 comments has only 18 accounts listed before the 10000 cutoff is reached. Presumably some 80 or so more accounts were also at 70 comments, but are not mentioned. How wewre items ordered? Not by username, not by creation date, not by karma, I guess it’s just random? Alas for the ~⅘ of the 70-comments-per-year users who were excluded by capricious randomness!
I'm also surprised that my name shows up. Like another poster said, small world.
It would be nice if there was a "solving the world's problems" tag and an rss feed without it ;)
I guess this is because HN de-emphasises usernames.
Not sure I agree, HN makes the username visible right next to the post? What I think (granted, I grew up with mailing lists and forums without images), is that we're so used to associating people online with pictures nowadays, that when there is no picture, why don't pick up the usernames anymore. Because I do recognize a lot of the usernames in the top 100, some even from just one comment I read but had an impact on me, and my memory made of flesh is really crappy most of the time.
Yes, but grayed out, in the background, so to speak. I usually do not notice the username at all (capableweb, hi! this is the first time I've noticed you...). Especially the usernames next to topics/stories are completely ignored by my brain's eyes.
As I mentioned before, I grew up back when the internet was mostly text, so maybe that's why? Are you perhaps a bit younger than that?
I don't think it is age-related, but I was exposed to the web just when AJAX / DHTML / SOAP was taking off (c. 2006/7).
I appreciate that HN is a kind of a community where people post when they actually have something to say. I mean, I often write a comment and then delete it before posting it if I figure it doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
I actually feel like doing it for this comment too.
If you would like to contribute more, Caslon has a great post here with advice. It’s more than a game though, we all come here not just for the stories, but for the high quality comments. Contributing high quality comments is a real benefit to others, whether your gamifying it or not. Having the discipline not to comment when you don’t have a real contribution to make is also valuable, you’re being a good member of the community. I commented on this post almost an hour after first reading it. I wanted to be sure I had something I thought was worthwhile to say.
Another way you can contribute is through voting, especially if you vote based not on agreement or disagreement, but on insightful or informative contribution to the debate.
I post too much crap here :s Ill be more careful posting since it's easier to stand out than reddit then !
FWIW, everyone I know who worries about their irrelevance to humanity or the zeitgeist is already someone who's contributed way more imagination and creativity than most other people. I feel irrelevant, too; I got to that feeling by proving to myself how little it means to build even the grandest projects, in the medium we work in (code). Recording music again, painting again, just remind me how irrelevant we all are. That's okay. It's in line with realizing you're not the only person with brains on earth; the dude your girlfriend leaves you for might have some brains too, he's not just a cartoon. There's a glimmer of reassurance there when you realize we're all just human. It means you're not expected to be relevant like Julius Caesar, just, it's enough be a good and humble craftsman who's appreciated and compensated for his work.
Come to think of it, I'm not sure why other people are so stingy with upvotes. I vote pretty much everything I like.
[[sucking in air]]
...
just be sure you don't know of any way it can be hacked. It will be hacked, and that's what you'll learn from the experience. But HN is like putting out to sea in a canoe. You can't go back, and it's going to leak, so be more than ready.
What surprised me about this incident was how many script kiddies are out there. The sophistication of the attacks were so low. Very poor opsec (using compromised machines as jump boxes, but still logging into the site with their desktop browser with no VPN or Tor), very poor understanding of attack tools (LD_PRELOAD to make certain processes not show up in "ps", except we don't use a dynamically-linked binary to do that, so it has no effect), etc. I feel like I never converse with that type of person on HN, so I just forgot they existed.
I kind of assumed that whole field of specialization died off when people started getting aggressively prosecuted for this sort of thing, but apparently not. If anything, the crypto craze has really increased the demand for hacked Linux systems. I was very surprised to see thousands of compromised machines on major cloud providers attacking us, as well as a long tail of tiny hosting companies that I assumed didn't exist in the world of Linode and Digital Ocean. Like you can get a server in a rack somewhere and sell it to someone, and there are customers that buy that service. Mind blown!
Honestly the stolen credit cards were interesting, but overall not that big of a deal. We had free trials which were equally effective for crypto mining. Post-pay is always a drag. Lots of people that sign up with cards that have a spending limit well below what we claim the price is going to be. Other people issue chargebacks months later with excuses like "oh, I forgot I was using that" or "I didn't feel like I got the value for what you charged".
All in all it's an amusing business.
Although if a new account got negative karma early on, I would just abandon it.
Selective evolution towards an account with comments that hit well enough.
The majority of Hacker News users can't downvote, and because of that, you're almost certain to get more upvotes than downvotes, unless your comment has few redeeming qualities.
The majority of Hacker News also doesn't really upvote much. Your typical front page post has under a thousand votes, and posts are the easiest things to upvote. Comments rarely get over a hundred, and almost never get over three hundred.
A single vote can change the outcome of a thread. A reply, even a vicious one, can increase your chances of getting votes; there's a phenomenon in which people will upvote comments they dislike and or disagree with in order to have their response be higher up.
This does mean that HN punishes certain styles of particularly offensive or non-contributing comments, but most won't be punished at all. It's, like vmception pointed out, a system that encourages comments that do "well enough." Because there's no punishment in making a mediocre comment, there's always reason to post. Even people saying absolutely rancid things ideologically aren't likely to get downvoted unless they frame their comment wrong.
HN is about style more than it is substance; it's not an echo chamber, because it doesn't select on ideology. It selects on how pretty your words are.
If you can downvote, your comment WILL be downvoted based on ideology. No exception. HN is much, much less guilty of this compared to other sides (especially Reddit), but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. If it can happen, then it eventually will, and considering a single downvote buries the comment this a big problem. The real issue resides in using upvotes/downvotes to sort content to give "good" answers more visibility, so unless you only have text at your disposal to express your agreement/disagreement you're ALWAYS bound to have a biased echo chamber.
It very much is, to the point that this place is derisively called "the orange website" by those who can see it for that. You might agree with the precepts so it doesn't seem that way to you, but the sooner you can recognize them, the better off you'll be.
B) that also happens, there are also insightful things people hadnt previously thought of that people just like
C) as others wrote, only a subset of users can really affect consensus. So its more of a representative democracy, active users that have accumulated alot of karma are the ones that have to simply be unoffended. But others can flag and effectively censor anyway.
If you're really trying, you can accumulate over a hundred points in a day without posting any articles.
The site is basically a game if you're optimizing for points, and it's better designed than reddit because you have to actually know things to get them.
Have a niche programming language you like? Talk about it! Have a weird subset of computer science you wrote a thesis on? Write a few paragraphs a day on it! Have domain knowledge for something that isn't computing? "Debunk" all of the articles you see on it. Avoid controversial topics, because these don't grant you as many points. Go solely for uncontroversial deep dives into subjects you know about; it's far better for achieving as many points as you can possibly get as fast as possible.
You also have to have a particular style of writing. Detached, yet (at least on the surface) quite thoughtful. Use commas and semicolons rather than writing choppy sentences, and pay attention to your spelling; presentation is half the battle, and you'll have a hard time getting anywhere if you use less than stellar English. Otherwise identical comments will perform drastically different if there is a single misspelled "at least."
If you master these two steps, you, too, can farm Hacker News for points, get bored and eventually make another account when you want to feel the beautiful feeling of your words having attention focused on them once more, the sweet point-ticker on the top right of the screen offering you slow doses of dopamine throughout your workday that just doesn't hit the same if you're on an account with over ten thousand points.
I don't play this game anymore, as anyone can probably tell from this account and my willingness to break every rule I listed in this comment on it. It's fun to play, though, and I would recommend doing it if you have an aptitude for it; more people talking about more things deeply is always better.
I do see bot/troll type attempts on this board all the time, but they usually rack up a lot of points in a short span and can't sustain because they're not real people, or not actually saying something coherent besides "look at me".
The "Show HN" aspect is fantastic. You do see some wild stuff every day. I wouldn't deprive those people of their moment of glory.
But in the long run, I don't know what the point farming points would be, and neither does anyone else. If someone with 40k points disagrees with me, it's not like I think they have a more valid opinion. This, again, is a testament to the style of moderation on this board more than anything else, because it doesn't gamify herd mentality in the way reddit or even SO does.
Hacker News fills the same niche for me as competitive video game tournaments do (during a certain time of the year, an easy way to predict whether or not my account will post during any given month is to see how tournaments are going in the game I play most). Hacker News is like a video game you can play at work.
That said, you can also pretty easily monetize farming points. It's pretty obvious when people are doing this, but I also don't see it as mattering too much, so I've never minded it, even though I'd never do so.
It takes root in posting really good content, at least for a while. You get your points up, get seen as a contributor, and then you start posting your own blog posts. Nothing explicitly an ad at first; you're just trying to get people to start thinking of your blog as something that usually has good reads, and that . Then you eventually post about a thing you made that you think the audience would want to buy, and, not exactly shockingly, they do!
By framing it using something like "My startup failed... again. An analysis," or "Just got the first few bites on my product, after years of trying," you let the audience escape the feeling of being advertised to despite the motive being entirely profit.
There was one user that was so good at this they were on the front page nearly every month of last year and they sold $60k worth in units because of it, never getting called out for what they were doing. To be generous to them, the content was good when it wasn't advertisements. You have to remember that what's popular on Hacker News on any given day will also circulate around a bunch of tech sites that are bad at coming up with their own content.
One person that I actually know built a complete business out of subtly using HN for advertising.
This takes root in even smaller ways, though. Like someone popping up in every thread that's remotely relevant to say, "Hey! We're building a product that does this at lazyfiveletternamedotio! Check it out, it seems like it fits your use-case." Sure, they'll get criticized, sometimes. But they'll also get bites. And when you're selling software as a service substitute for $600/mo, it doesn't take very many bites to make being criticized on Hacker News worth it. Doubly so when you're taking venture and need to up your numbers for the next round.
Haha.
Actually HN seems to be least technical community (when it comes to arguing) out of all those I know (reddit, forums)
Discussions raaarelly *try* to go into the technical details, let alone deeply. I don't think I've seen more than 5 code snippets over year on HN
Not only HN's format doesn't favor this kind of discussions, but also it seems that people prefer more "abstract" more "fancy" topics
I think this because every time there’s a coding topic, we’ll get really specific, targeted coding comments that are relevant and make sense.
I meet a lot of ex-programmers now in “higher” positions that don’t allow programming. And many times they’ve expressed that they wish they were programming and look for excuses to allow programming. It’s kind of unique in what’s been shared to me. But I wonder if it’s the same for ex-accountants and others who love a profession but grew out of it for the money.
I will point out, though, that throwing code over the wall doesn't necessarily point toward one forum being more technical than another. A discussion on type systems or hygienic macros has far more technical depth than someone responding to a post with a code example of how to do something in React.
One can have better luck in getting noticed if you are early on the thread.
In a way those members who pickup new threads for discussion are pivotal for a community to thrive.
Sometimes this can be a signal about the content of your comment, other times it can be a signal about the content of the thread/topic.
There's a fun HN data mining project waiting to be done on voting/flagging trends, including cross-community topic sentiment surveillance within specific time windows.
Somehow, I find the opposite to be true. Probably I spend too much time on HN (as evident by the #66 ranking in this list), but most comments are just off-hand thinking/reactions to the submission itself. Some comments do come from being an experienced software developer who never had troubles finding work (which, I guess speaks to something but unclear exactly what, technical capabilities or be-able-to-bullshit? We don't know yet).
The times my posts do gets downvoted, I can mostly understand why, as I made the comment in anger/too emotional place. Maybe your comments are the same? The only time I really get downvoted without really understanding why (exception the emotions of the downvoter) is in various cryptocurrency discussions. HN seems very divided as soon as it comes up.
HN is such a good community though... No other place like this exists on the internet.
Reading over the top few names, even though HN doesn't emphasize usernames at all, I recognized quite a few of them. Quite fascinating and a compliment to their comment quality.