most of the time someone posts something here, you get:
- this is wrong, they forgot to pump the xyz modulator in line 18
- I dont see why they didnt do it exactly how id do it
- why do this? so and so already did it, and its in rust
- you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
and my favorite:
- this reminds me of this awesome startup xyzmodupump.co, it doesn't really do anything similar to this, but the name is similar, oh and by the way im the CTO full remote bay area free lunabars and dog sitter.
Here is an anecdotal analogy: Friends repeatedly call me Internet Explorer every time I share any Tech article that is > 2 weeks old. After a month I just stop reading tech news altogether.
Are they joking ? Yes. It is serious ? No, but it just kills all the fun.
Here is an anecdotal analogy: Friends repeatedly call me Internet Explorer every time I share any Tech article that is > 2 weeks old. After a month I just stop reading tech news altogether.
Are they joking ? Yes. It is serious ? No, but it just kills all the fun.
HN is also famously critical, cynical, and overall grumpy. You can find golden comments here (why I come back) but the majority of comments are not great and a lot of the frequent commenters are relentlessly negative and cynical.
Dan Lu already wrote a great piece about how “HN comments are terrible”: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/
Outside of HN and a few other circles, it's somewhat well known that HN comments are on average on the toxic side of the tech discussion spectrum.
Tech people are neurodiverse, have a long culture of being strident (Torvalds, ESR, et al.), and often tend to be in their own heads. That combination is probably just what all of this is. But one thing I try to remind myself of is that busy builders often don't have the time, or desire, to write detailed HN comments about what they build all the time. So comments here are probably, disproportionately, written by people not building things.
This kind of routine sounds familiar - it's the same kind that's brought up when applied to other forums on this forum itself. I kept thinking I could escape that cycle by finding the place away from "the other mindless information hoses". The impression I got from reading comments here makes me want to believe this, but I don't think it's true. And the false sense of superiority that got into my head from thinking I'd found the nicer place led me astray.
There are a lot of comparisons of this site to others, but regardless of what HN is labeled, I think that despite the engaging conversations that do take place, the comments are not always a comfortable place for me to return to. It's to the point where I've seemingly overestimated the many pronouncements of better moderation, or that it's less toxic than that other place, or that there's insight to be found in lots of places. The catch is that all those things might be true, and yet one can still feel worn out by everything in this place besides the unequivocal good. I can count on one hand the times in the past five years where an article or comment I read on HN meaningfully changed my life.
Additive firehouse sites can still house valuable information, and said sites are unlikely to go away in the long term from scores of people bickering at them from a distance. The world is far larger than what a single orange site can encompass.
More and more I use HN just for the links.
And even that seems problematic at times.
I see "the orange site" phrase used a lot over at lobste.rs, and they obviously followed a different path - you need to be invited or somehow known to get on board. So they've got less of what they think of as toxicity and everyone's supposed to be pals with each other. Except little conflicts and tantrums do happen every now and then, and there's less activity overall (current top story has 26 comments on it, 10 of the 25 stories on the front page have no comments at all).
HN was never perfect (since I found it), but it’s much worse now.
To be fair this has happened in general to a number of sites/thing in the exact same timeline. It’s not an HN specific problem, other than the degree to which such people may be attracted to the usual HN spheres.
So, no.
All I can do is tell you some of the keywords I block that improve my Twitter experience.
For instance:
brexit, brexit party, trump, maga, soccer, football, premiereleague
I have also blocked all the names of various celebrities when they "trended".
There are also some keywords that help:
suggestrecycledtweet_inline suggestpyletweet suggestactivitytweet suggest_timeline_tweet suggest_recycled_tweet suggest_pyle_tweet suggest_activity_highlights suggest_activity_feed RankedOrganicTweet ActivityTweet suggest_ranked_organic_tweet suggest_sc_tweet suggest_ranked_timeline_tweet generic_activity_MomentsBreaking generic_activity_Highlights suggest_grouped_tweet_hashtag suggest_activity suggest_who_to_follow suggest_recap suggest_recycled_tweet_inline
There are multiple sources of these, e.g.
https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac5...
Some do not keep working for long. :-(
2. People keep complaining that they write Twitter threads instead of blog posts, and they're tired of it.
It's a very bold assumption to expect the exact same structure in a blog post (which can be edited at arbitrary places within the entire document) than in a twitter thread (where tweets can not be edited once sent). Editing - or not being able to edit, for that matter - has a massive influence on the eventual resulting text.
In fact, the incremental nature of twitter threads kind of caters to the ADHD brain because it completely defeats self-sabotaging perfectionism by removing the opportunity to revisit and rework previous sections of the text. If you follow Foone for a while, you'll see that they tweet their thoughts and works as it happens. They don't sit down and prepare the entire thread beforehand because doing so would make it a lot harder to finish, if not entirely impossible.
Yes? A blog post is a commitment; you write out a bunch of text, and then you have the option to polish and edit it, so there's generally the expectation that you'll polish and edit it. But you don't want to do that, so you just write the blog post (or half the blog post) but never publish it.
On Twitter, you can just write half an unedited blog post, and then stop; and people will still derive value from that.
Twitter is a better medium for this kind of thing.
Writing many short pieces of content asynchronously and being able to GC them from your mental stack whenever you need is objectively a very efficient way to publish.
It's important to remember that not everyone's brain works the same as yours - for some people it's quite transformative to be able to document thoughts atomically.