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Ask dang: How many HN comments per day do you read?
- smeyer 10y agoFrom the guidelines: >Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com. This may not specifically fall in that category, but you may still want to email if you don't get your answer here.
- AlexandrP 10y agoI think andreygrehov not only one who want to know the answer.
- smeyer 10y agoI'm curious too! But I figured I'd post the email so that andreygrehov could get their answer even if dang didn't pop into the thread.
- dang 10y agoCome now, let's not punish smeyer for a good-faith comment, even if people did turn out to like this thread.
- rquantz 10y agoIs it good faith? It comes off as either pedantic or trolling to my eyes.
- libeclipse 10y agoSee why is this downvoted? This is what causes self-censorship guys. It's a valid opinion.
- probinso 10y agoO(n)
- tgb 10y agoHe reads only one HN comment per day, but it is always the correct one.
- dang 10y agoA 'best of the day' feature has been on our minds for a long time. We really need a way to collect the amazing stuff this community produces.
- tgb 10y agoThat would be an awesome way to realize a silly joke as a useful feature!
- nickpsecurity 10y agoOff top of my head, here's something with potential: 1. Filter out anything below 5 upvotes instantly. 2. Merge comments of duplicate OP's into one super-post. 3. Provide Vivisimo-like tech to auto-categorize and search those. Nice picture of what that looked like in document below. https://faculty.ist.psu.edu/jjansen/academic/pubs/vivisimo_jansen.pdf https://faculty.ist.psu.edu/jjansen/academic/pubs/vivisimo_j... I imagine HN comments would have a ton of tags generated by such an approach. So, a straight-forward search engine for them could help too. Not a Big Data guy so I can't do recommendations. However, this DARPA-funded, Watson alternative was open-sourced and might do interesting things for HN data: http://deepdive.stanford.edu/ http://deepdive.stanford.edu/
- cperciva 10y agoThis is something (perhaps the only thing) I miss here which reddit has: /r/bestof. Comments, no matter how good, never end up on /news and so anyone who isn't reading the rest of the discussion in question will never see them. Come to think of it, is there any technical limitation on having comments submitted as stories? Maybe it's just a cultural issue (i.e., there is no culture of submitting comments as stories here).
- dang 10y ago
- dang 10y agoI'm not sure. Probably a few hundred.
- sktrdie 10y agodang that's a lot.
- ethbro 10y agoDo you feel reading that many random comments has an impact on you? Hopefully we keep the experience net positive.
- dang 10y agoYes, because the comments I read are not random: they're disproportionately problematic. That skews my view in an unfortunate direction.
- ethbro 10y agoUnderstandable; that was unfortunately my experience with volunteer community moderating. You should add a script that gives you a random highly-voted comment with positive language to your toolbox. In the interest of balance and sanity. PS: Thank you for all you do for this community. You encourage our aspirations to be more civil humans.
- JulianRaphael 10y agoThanks for doing this for us to keep this a great place. HN has impacted me like no other site on the web.
- pgbovine 10y agoalso thanks from the countless numbers of additional people who mostly read this site and don't comment much
- jnpatel 10y agoalso: do you use any special tools to help monitor comments, or just https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments ?
- dang 10y agoLots of special tools. I'm working on revising them so we can open-source the parts that are useful for general reading. Right now it's a Chrome extension, but I'd love to serve it as plain JS. Anybody know if you can give a web app privileges to open and close tabs without making it a browser extension? (Don't worry, btw; if we ever publish this it will be entirely opt-in.)
- zuck9 10y agoYou can open tabs using `var w = window.open()`, and close them using `w.close()` Only thing is users must disable popup blocking for HN, in the unlikely case that you want to open more than 2 links at once, or open links when the user doesn't click something (like onload).
- dang 10y agoThat sounds promising. Is it possible to send messages between the tabs? My Chrome extension does that like crazy. Forgive me for hijacking this thread into technical support territory, but I've found documentation on this stuff hard to come by.
- crusso 10y agoWhile we're at it - thanks, Dang. You do a lot of hard work keeping HN a place worth visiting. I even appreciated the time or two you corrected me personally. The comments sections of most online forums are about useless and I know that places like HN don't stay this way by accident.
- colinbartlett 10y agoThe Shut Up Chrome extension[1] is one of my favorites and HN is one of my few whitelisted sites. 1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shut-up/oklfoejikkmejobodofaimigojomlfim?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shut-up/oklfoejikk...
- thucydides 10y agoThe quality of the comments here is so high that I often preface my Google searches with "site:news.ycombinator.com" when I'm researching technical stuff.
- CM30 10y agoDepends if anything controversial has been posted that day. Some topics I read get hundreds of comments, some get about 3. So I guess it depends on whether there's a political war going on or some giant controversy in internet land, or whether anyone's staying reasonable for a few days or so.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Reedx 10y agoA lot. I actually optimize for the comments, heh. I open HN links in new tabs and then wait a day or two for the discussion to complete before reading through them. So I don't end up refreshing for new comments or re-reading the same ones. There are a couple downsides to this though: One, I generally miss the window for participation. Two, my browser is perpetually filled with dozens of HN tabs.
- Kiro 10y agoGood comment but I think you missed an important part of the question. Unless you're dang's alt account.
- sdegutis 10y agoI don't know who dang is, and I don't go on HN enough for it to really matter to me. I'm not really part of the HN culture, I just come here for the occasional new software that might be of interest to me. It's likely there's a lot of people in the same boat including the person you responded to.
- Kiro 10y agoThe topic is "Ask dang", which I think Reedx misread as "Ask HN". That's all I'm saying.
- joemi 10y agoNot sure why your comment's light grey, but dang is... a/the moderator or the guy who runs HN or? I know it's something like that, and I just tried to look it up so I could tell you definitively, but I can't seem to find it stated explicitly anywhere here. Seems fair that a casual site user wouldn't know, if I'm not even entirely certain, and I'm on here every day. edit: OK, I found https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac... which says he's "in charge of the HN community". (I kind of wish I didn't have to turn to a 2 year old blog post to see that stated.)
- Reedx 10y ago
- maxxxxx 10y agoI sometimes read only the comments and not the article. I think that's a bad thing :-(
- jeffwass 10y agoI do that too at times. Sometimes I'm more interested in the tech scene's opinion on an article than the actual article itself. Other times, if an article is excessively long, or is a video, I look for someone that summarised the gist. On that note - am I the only one who would prefer to read transcripts of videos than watch videos themselves? Specifically news sites that only have the video report and not any accompanying text.
- nibs 10y agoI would like this too - I can read way faster than I can listen. Listening is awful.
- ethbro 10y agoI made a similar comments about videos vs text and got quite a few upvotes. So I imagine it's a similar sentiment among the HN crowd at least.
- douche 10y ago100% agree - it especially irks me on certain blogs where there is clearly a script that the person is going off of, but they can't be arsed to post that alongside the video of them talking into a camera. Or worse, a technical subject, where they are performing a complicated set of steps, including arcane terminal incantations. Lossy video compression really helps out with making that readable \s. It doesn't help that I'm basically in one ear and out the other with my auditory memory and almost photographic visually...
- dasil003 10y agoA decade ago I would have agreed with you. In blogging's heyday in general I found online articles to be of much higher value than the comments, especially as Slashdot descended into pure meme-dom. But these days there is a confluence of factors that have driven average web content quality through the floor. Whether it's the highly tuned click-bait industry, the easy accessibility of turnkey viral content platforms like Medium encouraging banal populist "think" pieces, or just the mainstreaming of tech startups as an average career path, whatever it is the average article I see these days is worth far less than the attention it expects. I'm not sure whether HN comments are the best use of my time either, but middlebrow dismissals not withstanding, at least they aren't a race to the bottom.
- anon987 10y agoLess and less. Too often comment chains devolve into nitpicking, pedantry, and into off-topic discussion where two people fight tooth and nail for Internet Points. From a technical perspective I get little or nothing from them, and from a discussion standpoint there's little reason for me to spend my time watching people nitpick each other over things that nobody in the community cares about.
- ep103 10y agoI get the distinct feeling we're getting more and more of reddit's overflow. If anyone knows any other websites like, HN, I'd love to hear about them.
- mintplant 10y agoLobste.rs is like HN but smaller and more closely-knit. Mail me if you want an invite. Metafilter doesn't have the same technical focus and has a markedly different overall tone, but is pretty much immune from the "reddit effect" due to a lack of upvotes/downvotes, good moderation, and one-time $5 signup fee.
- kbart 10y agoI'm here for almost 4 years now, and I see this comment probably once a month. For such large and diverse community as HN, it is doing exceptionally well.
- firebones 10y agoDon't forget the obligatory 18-comment critique of the OP site's design choices regarding page size, font, color scheme, and scrollbar and/or back button hijacking, not to mention hosting and CDN critique. It's common enough to warrant its own segregated meta thread for every post to keep it out of the on-topic discussion.
- askafriend 10y agoMillions, or so it feels that way.
- lexhaynes 10y agoI often read the comments first, and then read the article. I love comments sections in general (Gawker, Gothamist, NYT come to mind in terms of decent commenters), but I've never learned as much as in the HN comments section. I probably read ~500 comments a day on HN.
- CaiGengYang 10y agoDepends on my mood ... probably about 10 per day
- CaiGengYang 10y agoDepends on my mood ... probably about 10 per day
- CaiGengYang 10y agoDepends on my mood ... probably about 10 per day