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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

I've seen the same with comments (both negative sentiment and shorter length). Short, snarky, negative comments [0] normally get a much better response than well-reasoned, longer-form comments.

Not that karam matters on HN but I have been disappointed to see longer comments that I put a lot of effort into get ignored while short, pithy comments get way more upvotes/replies. I've spent literally over an hour on some detailed comments that didn't even get a reply from the original person asking a question and likewise had comments I fired off with near-0 thought that "blow up". It's frustrating that better content is not always rewarded.

[0] Something I'm guilty of

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I have 104872 karma on HN. You may find https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders and https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments interesting. However, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to sort one's own comments by ranking. One of these days I'm going to scrape mine and see if I can write the "rules of HN" for highly upvoted comments.

One is: HN does not like jokes, unless you put an explanation in the comment as well.

Hmm, I went looking for a comment [0] I made "sometime last year" talking about what does/doesn't get upvoted on HN, I finally found it, I made the comment 9 years ago (I literally stared at the date for a good few minutes, I thought it was much more recent) where I did a short analysis on my own comments over the previous 2 years (at that time) which sort of shows the opposite of what I've said (reviewing the comments I linked), only a few of them were short/snarky/pithy, most were not novels but were a little more fleshed out.

That said, I haven't done sentiment analysis on those or more recent comments but my guess is that "negative" comments get more upvotes

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13491266

I thought I had read you had 1048576 of karma and thought: what a coincidence: 1 megabyte worth of karma.

BTW, this comment is supposed to be joke-ish.

> One is: HN does not like jokes, unless you put an explanation in the comment as well.

Informative content gives people social license to approve of the comment. HN users intuit on some level that jokes are against the cultural norms; but being serious all the time in an open round-table environment almost goes against human nature.

I’ve felt the same way with social media in general. It’s about managing your resources. In this case it’s your time.

Something I’ve been experimenting with here is writing smaller comments that serve as an invitation for someone to write an equally lengthy or longer comment in reply.

If the accept the implicit invitation then we can have a longer conversation. It has had moderate success.

Longer content isn’t always better. There is something to brevity. Anyone can make a point with 2,000 words, but it takes writing and editing skill to make that same point and have the same impact with 20 words.

I agree, longer does not mean better and I'll be the first to tell you I can be long-winded but it's because often there is a lot of nuance and I want to make my point as explicit as I can and leave little room for misunderstanding.

Most of my longer comments start as a single sentence that I feel is too ambiguous or leave too much room for misunderstandings and so they grow from there.

I've certainly noticed the same. I have two accounts here, a main one, and one that I use as a throwaway for occasional personal/emotional, off-topic, or snarky comments. The latter has roughly 4x the comment-per-karma ratio at the moment.

Though interestingly that's largely due to a few specific comments 'blowing up' -- it's typically either 0 upvotes or 100+. I believe the median is actually lower despite a significantly higher average.

This is spot on and has really reduced my willpower to post, tbh.

Like begets like. A glib and snarky comment gets an emotional response, leading to quick, emotional votes. A nuanced, thoughtful comment gets the reader to think, but that's rarely conducive to upvotes unless they were already in agreement.

Over time everyone is Pavlovian-conditioned by the dopamine hit of upvotes to stick with the glib and snarky comments.

The whole upvote system is just a slow-acting poison that inevitably destroys any online community. HN has fared better than most, thanks to great moderation, but it won't resist forever.

>It's frustrating that better content is not always rewarded

It could be. Maybe we just fail to create better content, despite the effort put in. Maybe your frustration comes from lack of engagement, maybe your effort was lost in the ether and no one noticed... But getting noticed could be one criteria to evaluate how good content is. You perform better while not creating the content you consider better. Or captivating an audience to appreciate the better. You see, they don't.

Do you have a blog? It sounds like you would enjoy that.

I do have a blog [0] that I occasionally (I think I’m averaging once a year haha) post to. And it’s possible that trying to create better content has the opposite effect, though I’m prouder of the stuff I put more thought/effort into so even if it results in worse content for others, it’s something I want to put my name on.

[0] https://joshstrange.com

I was not suggesting that quality is inversely proportional to effort, but that could be true on this heterogeneous medium. Targeting a spread audience requires disproportional effort to soften ideas and not offend and put off. Done right, the "good" content will be polished and blend in, not getting noticed. While superficial this is obvious, designing content to be positive is designing it to be invisible. I don't think this applies to a blog because the audience was designed, whoever found the content already has a good number of characteristics you can assume. Incentives on hacker news are very pervasive and it is designed, literally, to relay a particular kind of narrative: more power to the middle man, if the middle man is backed by the good guys.

Ty for the blog reference, will check it for sure.

It could be that your longer and more thoughtful comments get a lot of upvotes, but also a lot of down votes from angry hackers who were oppressed by your writing. Resulting in a tiny negative or positive number. Impossible to tell.

Thank you for pointing that out.

I'm recalibrating my own behavior to upvote more.

Is it the desired behavior of HN that silent upvotes are for agreement? (Instead of a positive comment that doesn't add substantially to the discourse?)

> Short, snarky, negative comments [0] normally get a much better response than well-reasoned, longer-form comments.

My interpretation is that this is at least partially what flags are for. A comment that is clearly seeking to be amusing while also arguing a position, that would be clearly unfunny to someone who disagrees, is needlessly fanning the flames.

> I have been disappointed to see longer comments that I put a lot of effort into get ignored while short, pithy comments get way more upvotes/replies

I share the frustration. But publishing content on the Internet seems to be more or less universally like that.

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