Hacker News Reader

Yes, I'm very aware of that effect. The difference is that this was so aligned with the general attitude of HN users[*] that it stuck out as an anomaly; similar posts almost always hang around for a little while, usually several hours but sometimes over a day,

(*examples include 'right-to-repair, Louis Rossman, all the John Deere and phone hackers, general "I want to own the shit I buy". You get the idea.)

View on HN

Remember the average person doesn’t comment, they just lurk and maybe vote. Our sense of who the average HN person is comes from an incredibly skewed sample.

1% Rule [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

Arguably, there's at least two kinds on "average HN people", which I think of as participants and spectators.

For me (and I'm not claiming my opinion is any more than a probable "No true HN person" fallacy), people who never or extremely rarely comment are spectators. And while they quite likely outnumber people who comment regularly by 100 or 1000 to one or more, they are not part of "the HN community" because they do not participate in it.

I think most people's (including spectators) "sense of who the average HN person is" probably aligns reasonably well with the average HN _participant_.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com