My experiences with Hacker News.
blog.arsalanbashir.com
blog.arsalanbashir.com
It's also more hostile than I remembered, but oddly people use politeness as some weird passive-aggressive pulpit to combat each other. Replies and comments get seen as personal attacks and others quickly get dismissed as trolls. And when the simplest solution to dealing with anonymous people on the internet vying for fake internet points is just to leave well alone, some -- especially nicks I've seen around from five years ago -- have decided the best way to react is to respond. And poorly at that.
It's very much the same catty atmosphere I've encountered when hanging out with my art school friends and their cliques that they endure for their art.
But then again, it's the same eternal september problem that was discussed back then, regurgitated every year, and now we're here.
That said, there are good signals here and I keep seeing the same advice that people give: ignore the noise. But the challenge is two folds: what is noise and should you really be ignoring it?
The first is relative, you decide you own level of involvement but I do have opinions on the second question. I don't think it's right to ignore the negative comments. You can't improve your craft living on good vibes and hugs. So understanding that this place, relative to the rest of the world, is different place, it's both a sanctuary and a padded room. So take the inputs, review them, filter them, and prioritize them. Never internalize the hate but at the same time don't be naive.
PS: 17 is young but it's not that young. When I was in the Marine Corps we gave 17 year olds guns and entrusted them to be men and women that can get a job done when need be.
I found myself nodding in agreement at the author's lines:
"...most of them just criticized for the sake of criticizing."
"They simply hold on to one point and stretch it out, overlooking the fact that the point that they want to make is tangential to the discussion at hand."
I couldn't agree more. I have never seen a community where this is so true, nor have I ever understood why.
The world is a tough place and life is too short to get worn down by a few jerks on the internet hiding behind their keyboards. It can be tough to take criticism on work you spend hours writing, and someone writes a nasty comment having spent only minutes or seconds reading it. And even with dozens of good comments, one bad one can make you feel crumby. It is a shame because it discourages people from submitting good content, but I think its best to just ignore bad comments.
YouTube also provides an excellent example of the total failure of the "real names improve comments".
I strongly agree with the rest of your comment. Some people are jerks. One technique that it useful to ignore jerks is to take just a few moments to help control the thoughts caused.
You sit with the unpleasant thoughts for a few moments. You work out what the "hot thought" is; you work out what the emotion is. You then work out what the evidence is for those, and how strongly you feel it. Then you think about the person making the comment, about why they might have made those comments (are they attacking you for a realistic reason, or are they just attacking a block of text on a screen, etc), you think about the good comments, and then you assess how strongly you still feel your hot thought and emotion. This process should be enough to interrupt the negative thoughts, which can sometimes churn and stay with people.
Now on HN most readers can't downvote but personally I prefer some bad comments being higher than they should to Reddits mainstream-opinions only approach.
edit: Just realized that my HN account is from a time I used this pseudonym, pretty much everywhere else I'm found under my real name;)
Generally, but certain sub-Reddits have high quality discussions (/r/linguistics being one of my favorites).
What would happen to this point if it were merely "Yes, I agree."?
And shouldn't it be modded down? I mean, who wants whole comment threads consisting of that?
I think one of the fundamental underlying problems is just that the probability space of possible negative comments is just so much larger than positive ones that it isn't surprising that we end up with largely negative ones. I don't know what to do about it, and I've never heard a halfway feasible suggestion.
The signal to noise on HN is something like 1:100.
It's sad. I don't comment here anymore simply because there is no point when you never get comments from people who even bothered to read what you wrote or will honestly disagree.
Worse there are people who go out on personal vendettas, engage in nothing more than harassment and a form of stalking, and those people are not punished, but dare to post scientific information that disagrees with global warming and you get hellbanned.
That's the cause- the moderation is done by unaccountable people who moderate for political correctness at least as much for politeness. Certainly people who cant' muster anything more than personal attacks are allowed to get away with it, while those being attacked are often censored.
The people who are the cause of the problem like the situation because their egos are getting stroked, so they see no need to change it.
I've solved it for myself-- I just never bother to read the comments these days (for many months at a time.)
If there's nothing intelligent said on hacker news comments, why bother with them?
I'm disappointed though, I found myself disagreeing with you more than I agree, but you do have an interesting perspective on things. I'd just ignore those who are trolling you.
nirvana mentions global warming. While it'd be nice if HN could have calm discussions about science it's obvious that HN cannot have calm discussions about a variety of hot-button topics. This is even mentioned in the guidelines which urge against topics which are shallowly but intensely interesting. These are topics where people have already decided their position and they're not going to go into the discussion with an open mind. They're also topics where people tend to want to teach others the "Truth" that is being suppressed.
This unfortunate combination means that nirvana gets heavily downvoted on some comments.
It is a shame - dissenting opinions (if correctly formed) can be very useful.
I have a need for my personal conversations with people to be enriching and helpful, and so this makes me super sad. It's a large reason why I don't often comment on things in Hacker News.
Apparently by labeling the mods someone who moderate you, you again chose to ignore him.
If you authorize I'll find the post and put the thread link here, if not, I'll not be the one stalking you.
EDIT: wrote in a hurry including some lacking words.
Brilliant. I've just come from the linkbait thread where a 14 year old who's never been part of the HN community and is still only posting in that thread is playing the just a kid card pretty hard.
Clearly he knows about HN. Possibly he was lurking. Maybe he's not sure or is not confident enough to comment often. What he has done is created an app and a few interesting blog posts. As far as I'm concerned, that is what HN is all about!
I've been lurking on HN for 4+ years, and I rarely ever contributed comments, mostly just read articles and read the comments to see others opinions.
Don't think this is true? Take a look at how many comments are left on articles on the front page, then if you were lucky enough to reach the front page of HN, take a look at your analytics software. You'll see something like 20k visits in a short period of time, there's no where near that number of comments. Most people passively participate in this community.
Examples of Apophasis: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is war."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis
I'm trying not to be harsh with this, because I think the blog post was quite nice, but the only reason to say, "I am never going to play the 'I'm-a-kid' card" is to project a sense of superiority in comparison to kids who "played the card."
I think it's fine if you want your work to be judged on "adult" standards -- it's quite admirable. But if I was 14 and wanted advice on how a 14 year old should proceed, the advice could be very different from the advice you would give to someone you presume to be an adult. This is not an ideal situation, but it's a simple fact that being 14 puts you in a very different position than someone who is 24 -- it's impossible to show up at a bar to attend a meetup, it's harder to find other hackers (depending on location), and there are also a completely different set of life-related priorities that may factor in.
To put it simply: it's not the kid's fault for saying that he or she is 14. It's the community's fault for voting it up just because of the kid's age (if that's what's happening -- in many cases, the upvotes can also be well-earned).
As can be seen, most of the comments on this submission are now about discussing the age of the poster and how 17 is or is not a kid. Real enlightening stuff.
"Tell them you're only 17!"
If you do, you'll only self-identify as one of them. Average age is high teens to low 20s, if I remember correctly.
"People seemed to have a problem with everything."
To me this is the result of a large number of people participating. It makes the commenting system rather challenging. Basically anything that can be misinterpreted will be misinterpreted. Sometimes it's so bad I wonder if people aren't being purposefully idiotic, just to score some karma.
From reading your article, I imagine you found the attention worthwhile, though frustrating. Welcome to the club. In a strange way it's very seductive to have 10K fellow hackers come by and look at your work, even if they do miss the point, wander off on tangents, and generally posture for each other. Just be careful you're not subtly sucked into writing just for the HN crowd, unless you have an idea you want to sell to a lot of nerds.
From a point of zero objective information I'd have guess the average age to be mid to late twenties...
My poll showed mid-20s, but that was 3.5 years ago. If I remember correctly, polls show the age continuing to drop as more folks join.
This isn't much of an argument, but if you think about it, people most likely to be on HN are people who are not doing anything useful besides consuming stuff. That group should trend heavily towards the younger and unemployed. As total numbers rise, total number of young people who are actively consuming HN at any one time should rise disproportionately, no?
I'd be very interested to see how the average age of the submitters of "useful" content - e.g. posts which rate highly (ok a very tenuous definition of useful) and content heavy comments - compares to the overall average.
It's also worth noting that in many cases, age is a variable with high deviation.
In my opinion, it’s not the fact that people here are
skilled enough to comment on the various topics that
makes it special. That people here have the ability to
think in more creative and vivid ways and have diverse
opinions (some not always correct, as seen in the case of
'misfits') makes Hacker News an interesting place.
I really don't like navel gazing posts. "How much traffic I got from HN", "What I learned from being on the front page", "How I was brewing my coffee when I hit the front page", etc. This is self-centric bullshit that may with some effort be turned into an interesting discussion, but it is not inherently interesting, leave alone being notable. It's neither N nor is it H.
Yes, sir.
Why do you think that commenting on these articles, especially with strongly negative content free sentences, is the right thing to do?
> I really don't like navel gazing posts. "How much traffic I got from HN", "What I learned from being on the front page", "How I was brewing my coffee when I hit the front page", etc. This is self-centric bullshit that may with some effort be turned into an interesting discussion, but it is not inherently interesting, leave alone being notable. It's neither N nor is it H.
The fact that those posts are so common, and voted up, seem to imply that for many people they are inherently interesting.
But let's assume that you're correct. Your options are to flag, to ignore, to add to the signal, or to add to the noise. You chose to add to the noise! That feels really sub-optimal to me.
I posted what I did to dissuade the OP from submitting similar junk to HN in the future. Flagging and ignoring doesn't have quite the same effect as it aims at the effect, not the cause.
Clearly the moderators frowned on this sort of behaviour, so you lost your ability to flag articles. Like I say, don't do that.
I released my first OSS project (here) at 17, and mentioning my age didn't even cross my mind. You just take the feedback and criticism and reiterate like everyone else, because you won't have an excuse forever.
So, sure, he's still got that card to play. Not that he needs it; choosing to sit back and wait things out and not get dragged in to the HN morass was pretty level-headed thinking. I certainly would've screwed that up at 17.
I've had legit discussions here about real tech topics (for example web apps vs standard EXE apps), and the guy who continually disagreed with me clearly down-voted every comment I made, and replied with out-dated counterarguments. I wound up losing almost all my karma from one discussion, all while remaining civil.
It's very discouraging to be new here, and try to openly express an opinion. It should take more than one to down-vote a comment successfully.
Your original post is a bit ridiculous too. OSS isn't for the commonfolk? I guess android isn't the most popular smartphone OS and ubuntu isn't grabbing huge market share.
Programmers aren't some mythical beast people hear about but don't see. Open source software is usable by your grandmother.
Obviously there are exceptions to both sides, but I found it very conflicting reading his article with so many things that (to my interpretation, at least) read as though he was trying to put himself on a badass pedestal.
p.s. I have read your original post's comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016620) and I completely agree the comments were nastier than they should have been to make the same point.
It's why I read comments from the bottom, up.
Learn to have a healthy disdain for HN, I do, but every now and then a thoughtful comment or submission will sparkle like a gem in this muddy noise and being here may even seem worth it.
Great idea, I'll be trying this. Edit: Actually in this particular thread it's the opposite..