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Celebrity, or meritocracy? With comments, that's the ultimate question. See, when Joel writes a small piece of advice for B2B sales ( http://news.ycombinator.c
by sdrinf 16y ago
Celebrity, or meritocracy? With comments, that's the ultimate question.
See, when Joel writes a small piece of advice for B2B sales ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987223 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987223 ), knowing the background he's coming from, that advice get a disproportionately higher weight both in my mind, and my upvoting-finger, than Random J Commenter.
And Yes, I am implying here, that Random J Commenter doesn't know shit about B2B sales. With his advice, the most action I can take is careful, small-scale controlled experiments, 2 times out of 3 blowing right to my head. Because Random J Commenter's infosource is not the real world, but rather techcrunch, or, more likely, other Random J Blogger.
The other aspect of this, is user-based browsing, which I tend to do a lot (following 10+change HNers, and looking where they comment -as opposed to the stories on frontpage / askHN). This also gives them point leverage -after all, this way I see only the things they care to comment about.
The single most important observation I take from the above two, is that neither of these are the kind of shallow things PG is remarking in his articles -both are meritocratic worth of value provided by these "celebrities".
It just happens, that business knowledge is distributed disproportionately.
- brlewis 16y agoI also do user-based browsing. It's a dumb heuristic for finding good comments, I know. But I don't have a better algorithm that won't waste much time.
- rcfox 16y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoIt used to be that that found good comments. It still sometimes does, but now it finds highly voted comments, which although correlated positively, is not the same thing.
- logicalmind 16y agoThe problem is that you really don't know who Random J Commenter is. That person could be a more successful and more knowledgeable person who just happens to NOT want to be a celebrity. There are plenty of smart people who simply don't want to play the popularity game. That doesn't make their input any less valuable. Additionally, in my opinion, you are going to find more success in following tangential ideas from someone successful. You aren't going to duplicate what pg or Joel or any of those guys have done. The real value comes from intelligent people discussing tangents to some idea or theory. And if popularity is disproportionally rewarded to the thought behind the discussion, then the result will be less contribution to the site.