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If I was writing a book, I'd do a terrible job, because my nose for what people want is broken. When I write essays, I don't care, I write everything and I let
by neilc 15y ago
If I was writing a book, I'd do a terrible job, because my nose for what people want is broken. When I write essays, I don't care, I write everything and I let Hacker News and Twitter sort out the wheat from my chaff.
Personally I think this is a bad idea, because what is popular on HN rarely correlates with what I consider to be quality writing. If your goal is just to get an article on HN, that can be done pretty easily: give it a provocative title, discuss one of a handful of topics (e.g., node.js, Clojure, Scala, Rails, Apple/iOS, etc.), and make it easily skimmable within 30-45 seconds.
If HN popularity was a reliable metric for quality, TechCrunch would deserve a Pulitzer. If you want to write short pieces that attract the interest of a programmer while their code compiles, HN is a decent metric. If you want to write something with lasting meaning or value, it is not.
(Obviously, that isn't to say that nothing on HN has lasting meaning or value -- just that the correlation between lasting quality and HN popularity is weak, at best.)
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- raganwald 15y agoSorry, I deleted another reply. My essay perhaps does a poor job of explaining what I meant when I used the word "quality." I meant quality of exposition, not quality of ideas. So I meant, it's more important to get your ideas out there quickly than to polish, polish, polish, or worse to avoid writing at all because you fear you don't write well. The subject of whether your ideas themselves are good is another kind of quality. If they're your genuine ideas and they genuinely interest you, that's good enough for me. It may not be good enough for HN, but if you're writing "honestly," you have my support and admiration. If someone wants to try "HNO" (Hacker News Optimization) just for the false reputation, well, I can't help them and they probably know more about how to game aggregators than I can even imagine. But if you have genuine ideas that interest you, my discussion of "quality" is strictly about the delivery.