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Great comment by @dang downstream in that thread. I missed it the first time around. Thanks @jackquesm! My little bit to add here, for what it's worth. (I've b

Great comment by @dang downstream in that thread. I missed it the first time around. Thanks @jackquesm! My little bit to add here, for what it's worth. (I've been here since the first few months or so). Good conversations don't have to involve a back-and-forth with your ideas always being involved. In huge groups of people, many times I find it good enough to try to add something useful to the discussion, provide a link for more depth if necessary, and then shut the hell up. It's not the "me" show. I post stuff I've created all of the time here that doesn't get traction. As the old saying goes, thems the breaks, kid. Every now and then some oddball thing I've said or posted will take off, and that's a pretty cool feeling, but I learned not to chase that feeling. Instead just try to be a decent and respectful participant and delete more content before you hit the "send" button than you actually post. The rest of it is pretty much effectively random. (Insert discussion here about how some folks have such a good reputation that it doesn't matter. I don't like it. Many of them don't like it. But it is what it is)

ryandvm 5y ago
> Good conversations don't have to involve a back-and-forth with your ideas always being involved. That's a great point. Generally my favorite part of the comments are all the little atomic nuggets of wisdom that folks post in one-off comments that are just tangentially related to the topic. To be honest I find most of the "conversation" threads to be tiresome as the typically just consist of 2 or 3 people talking past each other until the thread peters out.
ryandrake 5y ago
Quoth dang: > Quite a few HN users, including some of the most prominent ones (and some of the best writers too), started off with a pugnacious commenting style and learned over the years to modulate that in the interest of curiosity, both in themselves and others. That's the learning curve we all have to go through here, and are still going through. Not saying I'm prominent or a great writer, but here's an example from my own posting history showing two comments with the same general message, but the first one done in an unnecessarily provocative and condescending way, and the later one done after learning how to tone things down: Score: -2, confrontational, no productive discussion generated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581452 Score: +95, modulated, resulting in better discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997427
- DanielBMarkham 5y ago
  It's interesting. There _is_ a monoculture here, perhaps even an echo chamber, but it doesn't break down along the usual lines. I like good conversations, like most. Not arguments, but folks simply talking and asking questions about things that they have massive internal disagreements about. I find such conversations useful to understand better both others and myself. (And I don't mean necessarily politics. Anything, really, except perhaps for that tabs-versus-spaces thing. Ain't going nowhere near that one) In that spirit, I remember posting links to essays I've written like "Does God Exist?" (It was a recap of a Summer spent reading and listening to essays and lectures on the subject) I would not do that today. In a big way, the site has gotten more, well, mediocre. It has somewhat unwritten standards and dang and the bunch do a great job of helping us keep them. But there's this huge list of rules and topics about content that are strictly enforced by the mob, and they wax and wane throughout the day. For instance, I am more likely to get a lot of traction on an interesting article if I post early in the morning, when my European friends are starting their work day. I get better traction on comments later in the day, when my California friends are finishing up their day. Beats me why and I haven't looked into it. About every month or two I get a comment downvoted. The last one was back in March when I pointed out that types can completely replace unit tests for pure FP code. I used to consider such downvotes an indication that I had misread the room, I was venturing somewhere I shouldn't. I would delete them if I could. Then I noticed some getting downvoted a lot only to come back with a positive score after a few days. There was a big element of randomness to it and not much useful signal in all of that noise. Now it's about 50/50. Half the time I delete those comments if I can. The other half of the time I wear that like a badge of honor. I meant no disrespect and was only trying to move the conversation along. Hell if I'm going to read a lot into what's mostly noise. I've been on the net since it went public. I'm a slow learner, and it's taken a lot of time, but I no longer worry about all of the wrong people on the internet. I still wonder where the guardrails are, and how groups of people solve problems, but I'm much happier watching than I am adding to the noise.

ryandvm 5y ago

> Good conversations don't have to involve a back-and-forth with your ideas always being involved. That's a great point. Generally my favorite part of the comments are all the little atomic nuggets of wisdom that folks post in one-off comments that are just tangentially related to the topic. To be honest I find most of the "conversation" threads to be tiresome as the typically just consist of 2 or 3 people talking past each other until the thread peters out.

ryandrake 5y ago

Quoth dang: > Quite a few HN users, including some of the most prominent ones (and some of the best writers too), started off with a pugnacious commenting style and learned over the years to modulate that in the interest of curiosity, both in themselves and others. That's the learning curve we all have to go through here, and are still going through. Not saying I'm prominent or a great writer, but here's an example from my own posting history showing two comments with the same general message, but the first one done in an unnecessarily provocative and condescending way, and the later one done after learning how to tone things down: Score: -2, confrontational, no productive discussion generated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581452 Score: +95, modulated, resulting in better discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27997427

DanielBMarkham 5y ago
It's interesting. There _is_ a monoculture here, perhaps even an echo chamber, but it doesn't break down along the usual lines. I like good conversations, like most. Not arguments, but folks simply talking and asking questions about things that they have massive internal disagreements about. I find such conversations useful to understand better both others and myself. (And I don't mean necessarily politics. Anything, really, except perhaps for that tabs-versus-spaces thing. Ain't going nowhere near that one) In that spirit, I remember posting links to essays I've written like "Does God Exist?" (It was a recap of a Summer spent reading and listening to essays and lectures on the subject) I would not do that today. In a big way, the site has gotten more, well, mediocre. It has somewhat unwritten standards and dang and the bunch do a great job of helping us keep them. But there's this huge list of rules and topics about content that are strictly enforced by the mob, and they wax and wane throughout the day. For instance, I am more likely to get a lot of traction on an interesting article if I post early in the morning, when my European friends are starting their work day. I get better traction on comments later in the day, when my California friends are finishing up their day. Beats me why and I haven't looked into it. About every month or two I get a comment downvoted. The last one was back in March when I pointed out that types can completely replace unit tests for pure FP code. I used to consider such downvotes an indication that I had misread the room, I was venturing somewhere I shouldn't. I would delete them if I could. Then I noticed some getting downvoted a lot only to come back with a positive score after a few days. There was a big element of randomness to it and not much useful signal in all of that noise. Now it's about 50/50. Half the time I delete those comments if I can. The other half of the time I wear that like a badge of honor. I meant no disrespect and was only trying to move the conversation along. Hell if I'm going to read a lot into what's mostly noise. I've been on the net since it went public. I'm a slow learner, and it's taken a lot of time, but I no longer worry about all of the wrong people on the internet. I still wonder where the guardrails are, and how groups of people solve problems, but I'm much happier watching than I am adding to the noise.