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I nearly deleted my comment because I felt bad after the author replied and also because I generally want to encourage people to publish stuff they are not conf

I nearly deleted my comment because I felt bad after the author replied and also because I generally want to encourage people to publish stuff they are not confident about -- and I would never have posted this about a personal blog. But I decided to leave it because I think I stand by the implication that reputation for specific technical blogs can be earned or used up. Fly.io has earned a lot of reputation and I (and I guess others) clicked on a title I would not usually have because I saw the domain. In this case I feel like some reputation was "used up" and I am (slightly) less likely to click on a post solely because I see a fly.io domain in future. Maybe I am just not the target audience for the post and it is better than my assessment, but if not then I think people value HN as an honest audience that doesn't hold back on criticism (I know I do and I have received harsh but valid criticism from hn on stuff I have written). Fly.io can probably keep making front page based on reputation if there is a balance of very high quality content and other posts, but I feel like something like this could have been 1000% better with another revision round and some editing (probably only 20% more effort) so I will keep saying stuff like this I guess?

sixhobbits 3y ago
And just to be clear to your point of "not interesting enough" this is entirely about form, not the topic. If the content itself is interesting or not is hard for me to judge because of the obstacles presented by the form.
samruby 3y ago
> I felt bad Don't. I can honestly say that I didn't write this post targeting HN. I'll go further... this post wasn't meant for people who are unlikely to use https://github.com/fly-apps/dockerfile-rails#overview https://github.com/fly-apps/dockerfile-rails#overview. I recently added some features to that gem whose usage may not be intuitively obvious. I wrote this post to explain some of the motivation for those features. I don't know how to mark posts as not intended for HN (and truth be told, if there was such a feature, I'd be inclined to overuse it). I don't know where else I should have posted this content, but I'm not sure I would be inclined to move it. In any case, this post, as written, serves a purpose for me. Somebody not you and not me felt it belonged here. We can both second guess that decision. Either way, there is no reason for either of us to feel bad.

sixhobbits 3y ago

And just to be clear to your point of "not interesting enough" this is entirely about form, not the topic. If the content itself is interesting or not is hard for me to judge because of the obstacles presented by the form.

samruby 3y ago

> I felt bad Don't. I can honestly say that I didn't write this post targeting HN. I'll go further... this post wasn't meant for people who are unlikely to use https://github.com/fly-apps/dockerfile-rails#overview https://github.com/fly-apps/dockerfile-rails#overview. I recently added some features to that gem whose usage may not be intuitively obvious. I wrote this post to explain some of the motivation for those features. I don't know how to mark posts as not intended for HN (and truth be told, if there was such a feature, I'd be inclined to overuse it). I don't know where else I should have posted this content, but I'm not sure I would be inclined to move it. In any case, this post, as written, serves a purpose for me. Somebody not you and not me felt it belonged here. We can both second guess that decision. Either way, there is no reason for either of us to feel bad.