3 ms·

I posted the same a couple of days ago. I thought a story of the Whole Earth Catalog --written by a really good journalist, John Markoff-- would have been a per

• grzm 9y ago
  > "I thought a story [about X] would have been a perfect match for HN, but apparently not." Take a step back and think about the variables involved in any given submission getting significant uptake. A few off the top of my head: - does it get noticed? (and there's a bunch of factors that contribute to why it might get noticed) - does it get upvoted? - what other posts are submitted at around the same time? - is it a good fit for HN? Only one of those is fit. It's not uncommon for pieces to be submitted multiple times before finally getting a lot of upvotes. I wouldn't jump to any conclusions about fitness based on such limited data. FWIW, Kevin Kelly (Wired, The Well, Cool Tools) was one of the later editors of the publication as well, a name that might be more familiar to some HN members.
  • mkempe 9y ago
    That's a bit of hand-waving to get to the crux: the current HN collective is mostly unaware of recent decades, and does not care for it. Unless one makes a pandering connection with some name visible in the present day. It's a sad state. There have been some HN stories about the Long Now foundation, which would be a simple, present path for readers to know about Stewart Brand. But these stories weren't popular either. Edit: observations are not assumptions. Bemoaning the sad state of the world is normal when you observe intellectual or moral decay.
    • grzm 9y ago
      Let's stop making assumptions about "the collective", shall we? Submit articles you think are interesting, and make substantial comments that contribute and promote interesting discussion. Bemoaning the "sad state" of whatever doesn't help one single bit (and comes off poorly as well). The guidelines ask us not to complain that a submission is inappropriate: I think that likely goes for complaining about a submission's reception in general. You can only control what you yourself do. I regularly review my comments to see how they've contributed constructively to discussion: and that's not just by looking at their vote tallies. Sometimes I'm not happy with what I've done, and I try to do better. Are there responses at all? Are there substantive follow ups? Are the responses worse? A pet peeve of mine are the large number of snarky rhetorical questions that poke at others' comments rather than charitably teasing out the heart, and make stronger followups. Complaining about that would only make people defensive, which would make things worse. Constructive comments make for better discussion make for better participation which makes for better submissions and better comments. Focus on what you can do, and do it.
• walterbell 9y ago
  It's unpredictable, because a much smaller pool of people visit the new page and upvote stories. As a fallback, sometimes the mods will promote a story to the front page.