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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

This is off-topic, but there seems to be this trend on HN (and probably similar sites) where a post about Topic X will get a lot of comments/views, and the following several days similar posts will appear on the front page, in the format of "Why You Should Never Do X" or "A Better Way to Do X".

What I'm wondering is whether this is some sort of bias on my part (I tend to notice them because my memory of the original post is still fresh), or whether the subsequent stories are upvoted to the front-page because people want to discuss the topic more. And from the author's perspective, whether they are writing it to take advantage of the opportunity for increased page-views.

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One reason is I think topics drop off too fast. I know there is a flame ramp-up algorithm or whatever it is called when a large number of comments is added. But I think that needs to be refined. If there a large number of longer and highly upvoted comment that thread should stay up higher.

Say just recently there was an interesting thread comparing Erlang and Go concurrency and thread safety. There were interesting in-depth comments about schedulers and whatnot. Seemingly a good number of upvotes, yet before the end of the day the story was gone.

So I think people do want to discuss things more and it needs to be fixed.

Well I guess another way is to embrace this and just re-post other blogs and reactions and then in the thread post links to previous comments (as in "wait, you probably want to read the story from yesterday before commenting here..."), kind of idea.

Topics do trend, and the various camps will quickly rush to author and promote things that conform with their worldview. Users will search for correlating content to submit.

But to address something that is a personal peeve -

"And from the author's perspective, whether they are writing it to take advantage of the opportunity for increased page-views."

Much of the content that we see on here are people writing about topics that motivate them. If they saw a post that they think is wrong and they want to refute it, or if they think it is right and want to add supporting commentary, they author posts to support their position.

The majority of these posts have no ads, which is good because it is catering to a market that overwhelmingly runs ad blockers. There is close to zero retention or residual value for audiences like HN: people click to your post, maybe read it (if that), and for the overwhelming majority that is the entirety of the relationship with the author.

You don't shoot to the tops of the blogosphere. You don't rake in those fat Adsense dollars. You get a momentary period in the sun to evangelize some beliefs.

This has happened at HN for as long as I can remember. I generally like it, as I like the added depth and new viewpoints this tends to bring.

For what it's worth, I wrote this article on promises, but I didn't submit it today. I was surprised to see it show up here. So the trend is not always people trying to take advantage for their own benefit.

I'm looking forward to this. I'm currently forced to deal with this strange world of promise based CSP-style development and I'm not sure if I like it or not, but it certainly is interesting. And I can certainly see the charm of such a solution, I can ignore that certain calls can block and everything stays responsive.

Note that this is coming from someone who's usually fudging around somewhere deep in a server stack and who usually works on high-performance systems with careful control about threads, hot loops, boundaries between threads and such. Responsiveness isn't my world, but maybe I can steal some ideas here :)

It certainly happens. HN has a lot of self-promotion going on, and a lot of people love to hop on bandwagons. Both reasons are compelling evidence for consuming fewer blogs and more whitepapers; at least when it comes to the practice of developing software.

> fewer blogs and more whitepapers

Is there a Hacker News for whitepapers? Because I've heard this comment a few times now, and I'm ready to start.

So look out for co, fibers, async, etc. posts in the coming days. Promises are still my flavor of choice for most use cases.

It's called content marketing.

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