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Hey, meta comment since I found this post first through your meta post / tweets about trying to get this to the front page of HN. It's great content, and exact

Hey, meta comment since I found this post first through your meta post / tweets about trying to get this to the front page of HN. It's great content, and exactly the kind of things I want to read here, but wondered if you had thoughts about how to solve the Goodhart's law[0] effect. e.g. in an ideal world for me (and I guess for you too), the best posts would more naturally rise to the top of places like HN that ostensibly act as quality filters. I really like your posting advice in general as most of it is about 'how to improve quality', but some of it (choosing what time to post at etc) falls into 'how to improve my chances at this gambling like system'. I have mixed feelings about this. Having a higher barrier to entry does lead to higher quality posts (and in one possible future, only people who have read the 'how to get to front page of HN' guide can get to the front page of HN). On the other hand, I've seen the problem of 'should we invest this dollar into producing a better quality Widget or into telling people more effectively that our Widgets are the best?' kill entire organizations when the see-saw tilts too much to the latter. Maybe I'm relating some things too broadly and it's actually nothing more than 'hey I post high quality content and do things to help it succeed', but wondering if you've thought about this tradeoff at all / if you're worried about getting deeper into the metrics rabbit hole that you've discussed in some of your other posts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

mtlynch 6y ago
Hey Gareth, good question! It's unusual for me to try to "time" my submissions to Hacker News. When I published this post, I thought it would be interesting to live tweet my publication day process,[0] so I published sooner than I originally planned because it was a slow news day on HN. But it ended up not gaining traction on HN that day anyway, so even that optimization seemed to have no effect. But overall, I think the HN filter works pretty well. I can't think of anything I do to get an edge aside from investing a lot more time into editing and illustrations than I think most bloggers do, but that would be the filter working as intended. I do worry about taking scores and readership metrics too personally. When I published my first code review article back in 2017,[1] it flopped on Hacker News and on reddit, the two places I was hoping it would find readers. I felt awful because I spent more time on it than I'd ever spent on a blog post before. I took a break from watching the metrics and went for a run, and that cleared my head. I decided that I felt good about the post regardless of what response it got, and I need to have that attitude on future posts. When I got back from my run, it had taken off on reddit, which made me excited but also kind of interfered with the lesson I was hoping to learn. But I do try to view my articles mainly in terms of how good I feel about them and maybe 20% what kind of response they get. [0] https://twitter.com/deliberatecoder/status/1334156012132118530 https://twitter.com/deliberatecoder/status/13341560121321185... [1] https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-1/ https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-1/
- sixhobbits 6y ago
  Thanks for the response! I made that 2017 post compulsory reading for a bunch of code reviewers I helped train if that counts for anything :)

mtlynch 6y ago

Hey Gareth, good question! It's unusual for me to try to "time" my submissions to Hacker News. When I published this post, I thought it would be interesting to live tweet my publication day process,[0] so I published sooner than I originally planned because it was a slow news day on HN. But it ended up not gaining traction on HN that day anyway, so even that optimization seemed to have no effect. But overall, I think the HN filter works pretty well. I can't think of anything I do to get an edge aside from investing a lot more time into editing and illustrations than I think most bloggers do, but that would be the filter working as intended. I do worry about taking scores and readership metrics too personally. When I published my first code review article back in 2017,[1] it flopped on Hacker News and on reddit, the two places I was hoping it would find readers. I felt awful because I spent more time on it than I'd ever spent on a blog post before. I took a break from watching the metrics and went for a run, and that cleared my head. I decided that I felt good about the post regardless of what response it got, and I need to have that attitude on future posts. When I got back from my run, it had taken off on reddit, which made me excited but also kind of interfered with the lesson I was hoping to learn. But I do try to view my articles mainly in terms of how good I feel about them and maybe 20% what kind of response they get. [0] https://twitter.com/deliberatecoder/status/1334156012132118530 https://twitter.com/deliberatecoder/status/13341560121321185... [1] https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-1/ https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-1/

sixhobbits 6y ago
Thanks for the response! I made that 2017 post compulsory reading for a bunch of code reviewers I helped train if that counts for anything :)