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Comment by tpoacher | Hacker News Reader

One thing I always find interesting / amusing is how the timing of certain types of post here on HN is in a sense far more informative (e.g. by implication as to "what is the current zeitgeist that has suddenly made this "news" or relevant again?), than the linked articles themselves.

E.g. crablang wasn't exactly announced yesterday for this to be newsworthy in itself; but an HN top post on crablang almost serves as a reliable signal for yet another rust gossipworthy event being in the news.

Same with Signal/Telegram as a signal for WhatsApp; Telegram as a signal for E2EE, etc

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It was posted in the comments to the 'Why I'm leaving Rust'¹ post that made it to the front page two days ago. At that point it was predictable that Crab would make it to the front page in a day or two.

Comments with links on front page items tend to turn into successful submissions within a day or two like that. Or rather, a fair number of front page items at any time turn out to have been preceded that way.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36101501

Agreed that this is one of the major mechanisms. But that's not the point I'm making here. It's a more general point regarding how the implicit "Why now?" question is often more newsworthy than the explicit "What?" being reported.

And also the fact that, unless the reader is willing to make a conscious connection to that fact, the lack of nuance often serves to swing a discussion in the opposite direction to what conscious examination of the timing would suggest (e.g. via the framing effect).

This is the power of the media and why people fight over it so much. Whenever you see content you should not only question the content itself but also ask “why am I seeing this now”?

Why am I seeing this now?

I think one of the most influential factors of a topic making a top post is simply the timing of the post. The most interesting topic won't make it if it is posted at an inconvenient time for the largest audiences.

Indeed, I was like - wut? again?

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