How to write a Hacker News comment

I would say this is how you would like to write HN comments, and these are the comments you personally would like to read. Which is fine, bless you and I hope you find more of what you seek on HN in 2012!

As for me, I have different tastes. I like reading questions that lead in fruitful directions. Many questions are annoying noise, but as Sturgeon notes, "90% of everything is crud."

For example, I think a legitimate response to my opinion about questions is to ask, "So, what distinguishes a good question from a bad one in an HN comment?"

Next: This comment has a lot of "I" in it. I write in first person, and I like other people doing the same. The whole third-person thing strikes me as faux-academic, as if we're writing dissertations instead of humans communicating with each other.

That's fine when the topic is suitably bloodless, but startups and hacking is actually very much about people and emotions and opinions. Startups are not an empirical science. Programming is not an empirical science. As I write this, the top post on the front page is about "trust."

We can write third-person comments about how the marketplace might respond to a company's behaviour, but we can also talk about our own personal reactions and opinions. I welcome comments that are written by living, emotional, chaotic, and messy-minded humans. It's actually why I like HN!

That being said, there's a lot of bad first-personal stuff. I can't give an objective metric for it, but I can say that one 'comment smell' is making it personal or taking it personally.

I'm not sure how to pull it off gracefully, but a great first-person discussion communicates how people feel without insulting each other or getting angry about the disagreement.

The two acronyms that come to mind are "JM2C" and "YMMV." They indicate that we all have personal viewpoints, and that we accept the possibility that others have valid perspectives. So I'll end with them:

JM2C, YMMV.

A few of his observations, don't make much sense. "Don’t write in first person" Huh? There's no reason why I shouldn't write in the first person, especially if I'm speaking from my own experience. "Questions are rarely points therefore good commentors rarely ask questions" I'm not sure exactly what this means (Questions are rarely points?) An interesting question can be as valuable as an interesting answer (although I do agree that we shouldn't ask banal or easily googled questions).

Writing in the first person is fine, if used to communicate your experience, rather than to pass judgment. It's more honest than trying to render an objective perspective of your experience, passing it off as common knowledge or group consensus.