Hacker News Reader

Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

One of my strongest recommendations to people on social networks is to engage down-thread. Talk to other people, not just the top post. Get beyond your glancing para-social relationship, and expand your Metcalfe-factor by commenting and liking other people's engagement.

Especially for new or young networks, a lot of people are truly starved for engagement & don't see the pattern of being engaged with. Engagement has to be bootstrapped, by people individually deciding to look through & find & engage with others who are putting themselves out there.

The opposite of the curve shown here is the "who is engaged with" curve. And it's like 0.3% of people (made up number) getting 99% of the engagement. It's a tyranny of popularity, and it legitimizes everyone elses dead quiet, their non-activity. We ought engage more robustly. Not just with the popular magnets.

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Is it worth the effort for any individual poster though? The unreachable segment (read only, doesn't comment) which already makes up the vast majority of audience is practically un-engageable. Among commenters, there's the blend of low-effort 'this'-type posts, soliloquizers (though possible therapeutic for the poster), and lizardman-constant/flame type reactions. It seems that in most venues, the effort to read through all comments and find anything valuable to engage with has a low social ROI.

What sucks about HN in particular for this is that as soon as you start engaging with a thread you are very interested in, getting a lot of replies, etc, you are locked out of commenting due to the flame war rules. Then whenever you are unlocked again later in the day perhaps, you've forgotten all about that discussion and have moved on. Whatever potential discourse that was there nipped in the bud.

The more you comment the less the flamewar rules apply.

Oh interesting, then it basically looks for a higher rate of commenting than average.

If so, that's a clever design.

Will second this. It's why I live in the comments, rather than scurry for OP recognition. It's why I invite comment and critique, so I can learn more things from other perspectives I'd not considered (not gonna lie though, that's a rarity on social networks and forums these days, compared to the usual goalpost-movement and general nastiness).

The OP gets the discussion going, but the discussion is in the thread. Sticking to the top level is like judging a book by the Goodreads summary and reviews; to really appreciate the content, you have to read the book.

Here is a fascinating (and troubling) look at comment manipulation by the platform. Here on TikTok a woman shows the differences between the top comments shown on her account versus her (male) partner's:

https://www.tiktok.com/@elieli0000/video/7446090349551815968

Great video - thanks for sharing!

I guess it depends on the network? From what I've seen, most people are there for the 0.3% getting 99% of the engagement. Whether that 0.3% is the big accounts on Twitter, or whatever is on the main page on Hacker News. Try making a comment on a HN article a couple of hours after it falls off the front page - you're extremely likely to get anyone to notice you. A few days? You may as well be yelling into a void.

There are a handful of exceptions - some small Reddit subs, some old forums. But for the most part, people on social media aren't really interested in something that's not already popular.

You are not the top post, but so what? I interact with posts that spin my brain, like "That is good... that is really good."

I agree with your idea to engage down-thread.

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