Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

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This is tyical advertisers' bullshit. It assumes that all people are sheep.

The line of advice should've been "Nobody wants to read your shit if you're trying to sell them something". And even then it would've been half off imho, but I can't come up with anything better.

Some of the highest voted articles HN don't follow any of the detail advice in this article. But they're popular anyway, because they're interesting. Somebody made something cool, and people want to know how he/she did it. Sure, these only work in niches. When you go mainstream, the only articles that get read by many are "10 ways of getting your partner to gave sex with you more often".

But hey, this is an advertiser. What does he know about niches? More yet, what does he know about people who are actually, genuinely interested in a whole range of topics, and would happily spend 30+ minutes reading a single article?

Of course, any article an benefit from being fun and concise. But that's just bonus, no prerequisite.

Because if you've got something interesting to tell, people want to read your shit.

Actually, the primary theme of the article seems pretty solid to me.

"Nobody wants to read your shit" (unless you give them an good reason to do so).

That's not assuming people are sheep. That's assuming that people are self-interested. And much of the time they are.

So even if you ignore everything else the author wrote (which you seemed to, since you're arguing that HN articles are popular because they're interesting, and the author's answer number two included making the writing interesting...), there is a valuable lesson present.

If you want people to read your writing, write something that will appeal to somebody (say... your audience). It isn't even difficult to give somebody a good reason to read what you wrote: if they find it interesting, that's a reason; if they find it entertaining, that's a reason; if they get to escape their lousy life for 25 minutes, that's a reason. This is hardly revolutionary advice, but it is a good reminder.

The line of advice should've been "Nobody wants to read your shit if you're trying to sell them something".

But a writer's always trying to sell the reader something, even if it's only the next line of text, and then the next. In the bigger picture, a writer's selling knowledge, or a point of view, or entertainment.

'Interesting' is a side effect of being considerate to your reader, which is exactly the point of the OP.

Depends on your definition of sell I suppose. By that logic all of our interactions with people are 'selling' to them. When my boss asks me how many hours I've got left I'm 'selling' the 12hrs I need. When I hold open a door for an old lady I'm 'selling' that I care about old people. When I notice my SO is down because of family issues and I make her a nice dinner, I'm 'selling' that I'm a nice guy.

You can certainly frame life that way, but it doesn't feel very nice, to me anyway.

Yeah, it's one way to interpret things - not necessarily right or wrong.

In a sense, we, ourselves, are the biggest targets of our selling efforts - for example, taking certain actions that are consistent with our self-image while avoiding actions that contradict it - in an effort to maintain a perception of our "self" as a consistent entity with consistent values over time.

His point #2 is "Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative."

I rarely if ever read an article on HN which isn't any of those things.

Seems like the same people you're saying didn't follow this advice actually have, conciously or not, followed it.

I think really what the author is saying is when your trying to sell a toothbrush it a razor, nobody really cares. The tech equivalent would probably be anti virus software.

"If you're pumping out good shit, people will follow you."

Gary Vee

Learn from the best, screw the rest..

"Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally."

-- George Orwell, "Why I Write" ( http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw/ )

Not everyone wants to change the world, and not everyone is Orwell, but I still think motivation matters. And if your sole motive is to "sell stuff, be famous, and/or popular", I give you this advice: don't write. Read instead.

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