Unsolicited Advice is a Valuable Clue
powazek.com
powazek.com
A minor nit-pick perhaps, but I am happiest when I'm working. Fair enough, I work for myself, from home, on my own business (and other endeavours), but I'm happiest when I'm doing that. I can go on holiday, and enjoy those, but nothing feels quite as good as a quality day of hard, productive work.
What happened anyway in the last week that this is becoming so popular?
What really wastes time is clicking through some link and reading five paragraphs of something that turns out to either be linkbait, or something that many of us have seen a dozen times before. Of course, many people think that the solution to this problem should be "never submit something that's similar to something that's been submitted before", but that turns out to be wrong, because new people arrive all the time, and they need an education in the basics. And the basics keep getting updated with new examples and new variants -- sometimes I really would rather read a restatement of something Fred Brooks said in 1978 than the Fred Brooks itself. But sometimes I wouldn't, because I'm too busy.
Perhaps the rise of these summaries demonstrates that submission titles aren't being crafted well, or that the technique for linking to stories is missing a "teaser" feature. Ever notice how many magazine stories have both a clever title and a short, one-or-two sentence teaser that talks a bit about what the story is actually about? (Nonfiction book titles utilize a variant of this strategy: a clever first title and a descriptive subtitle, separated by a colon, as in "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West"). Many submissions have clever titles, but often what we really want is the teasers.
And yes: I posted a comment because without comments I wouldn't read a link in the first place, and others may think likewise. So that's my motivation.
I know the HN community is growing and the spread of topics pushed to the front page is expanding, but the original point of letting a user type in a headline and then letting the community vote up interesting ones should in theory at least alleviate the need for a summary.
I compared the summaries to "first post" because they often feel like someone is posting them simply to post. On HN you obviously couldn't "post for the sake of posting" with an actual First Post, but typing up a sentence summarizing the first or last paragraph of the post is probably close to the bottom of an innocuous "post just because you can" contribution.
Second: If 200 new movies came out every day, the one-sentence newspaper movie review would be a much more highly respected genre.
Third: What does motivation have to do with it? If a cult of Cthulhu worshipers arrives on the site and tells me that their god demands that they provide neat capsule summaries of content as a guide for those of us who are deciding what to read, why should I care what their motivation is? Unless it turns out that reading their prose brings me face to face with a hitherto nameless existential dread that will haunt me throughout my days, in which case I'll probably downmod them. [1]
Finally: If someone posts an inaccurate capsule summary, rebut it. Such an exchange could end up being more interesting than the article itself. The reason I come to HN is to watch HN community members react to things.
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[1] It is also important that no goats be harmed in the making of Hacker News. Their blood donations must be strictly monitored by ASPCA veterinarians.
My main problem with the summaries (I have more than one but let me be brief ;) is this: Imagine if I replied to your comment with this:
Summary: Sometimes it's useful.
This is what you've said, but you provided one counter-argument to my comment, one personal explanation, one extrapolation on what I've said.
Then you expanded your first point, provided an example of recent problems on HN and how the summary might be a solution, then you've answered my question.
So, you see, you wrote something with an introduction, expanded on the premises, and a conclusion. You didn't just say "sometimes they're useful".
This is awesome, it's content. This is a quality conversation.
By reading one-liners, or depending on them to see if you're going to read the article, you're missing all the little stuff that separates the good from the bad.
For example, the summary that I replied on this thread "gets" that an advice on the interview is about how work there is done, but it completely misses the bigger point, made on the last paragraph. The article isn't really only about interview, but life in general. It's about reading between the lines, about empathy and communication.
By the way, I've flagged the article based on this. The main idea is solid (you've got to learn how to read people) but the execution was flawed. Besides, it's off-topic IMHO.
And this means we already have tools to deal with the quality of articles here. Votes and flags. One line summaries don't give enough context.
Besides, if you're inclined to believe in the summaries before reading the article, who can garantee that it reflects what the article is saying accurately?
Also, summaries add nothing to the discussion. Imagine loading this page and reading how I made coffe this morning. Comments waste very little screen space and time (by design) (ugh... cheap shot I know ;), but why would I want to read something that:
- Doesn't add content to the article; - Doesn't start a discussion;
So why have a comment that isn't meant to foster conversation, to provide insights? Otherwise, after my coffe, I moved a candy out of the table because ants were all over it :p
Yes. Welcome to the cruel world of information overload, where I don't have time to read 95% of the brilliantly crafted content that is being created on the Internet, to say nothing of the stupid stuff.
Yes, judging books by their cover blurbs and reviews is haphazard, even cruel. Yes, you miss out on a lot of good detail. Yes, it remains absolutely necessary.
I have to judge what to click on by: The title, a skim through the comments, and the link destination (which I actually find most significant -- I clicked through on this and read the real thing specifically because it had Powazek's URL on it, and his last article really hit home.)
Incidentally, "sometimes it's useful" is a terrible post because it has no content and is banal [1], not because it is short. There's a distinction between empty sentences and brief sentences! The summary we're all pointing fingers at had a lot of content, even if it wasn't anywhere near as pleasureable as the actual article.
Meanwhile, a parenthetical note: The flagging system is for things that are "spam or egregiously offtopic". And if you live in a happy land where you seriously believe that "how to avoid working in unacceptable situations" is egregiously offtopic for hackers, congratulations! I hope your amazing run of luck continues, for your sake. Because, in my world, Powazek's advice comes in handy on a monthly basis.
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[1] Just about any comment on a site can be useful sometimes. Even "first post" is useful: It demonstrates that the comments are working and that the comment moderation is very sloppy.
I was going to craft another response to you, but really, you're demotivating me with your choice of words. Welcome newbie to reality? Congratulations? My sake? Your world? What's up mf, can't we talk normally? At least agree that we disagree on these summaries?
Gee... cool down. If you like the summaries, upvote them... by the amount of positive votes they're getting lately, they seem to be pretty popular... but I was just trying to understand why it looks like they're here to stay and at the same time say why I don't like them...
Edit: I typed this reply before you added more text to yours, so it looked like all you were doing was mocking me :p
But it was almost certainly an innocent mistake (it's not as if the intended use of the "flag" button is known to anyone who hasn't read the entire guidelines page or been present during its invention) so I'm sorry that my reply came out as snippy as it did.
also: > "By the way, I've flagged the article based on this. The main idea is solid (you've got to learn how to read people) but the execution was flawed. Besides, it's off-topic IMHO."
weird. i appreciated the insight in this article, as well as the general brevity. is flagging the new down-voting? or am i missing the scope of what should be flagged? (i rarely downvote and have never flagged. i like to be inclusive. i also see the necessity of information overload handlers, so we might just want completely different systems).
[edit: eit. looks like the flag point was handled by mechanical_fish and inerte above. good work :-p]
Of course, sometimes that feature is one that makes certain users give certain other users money in exchange for counterfeit Viagra. But not, I think, in this case.
But seriously, it's a good idea; but why not do it within the current design? That way, you get voting on the summary too. Herring's point about RSS could be accomplished by including the top comment in it...
And only show one summary to normal viewers, the highest voted one. If people want to contribute to the summary pool or vote on summaries, they can perhaps click in somewhere.
Compared to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466917 which took some effort. No votes at all and one reply which managed to avoid everything I wanted to talk about.
When writing said summary comment, I started off wanting to say "Look look, you have to look at that, it's brilliant, it's not the usual "my opinion about X" blog post!", but a summary seemed more fitting.
On the iPhone, I read comments first because they load and render quicker, and like concise summaries. It's not extra content as such, but it is a contribution.