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Ask HN: Why are Show HN texts so long?
Context: I've been really wanting to show something I’ve been working on the past few weeks. But I’ve always felt a bit intimated by the amount of backstory, context, side notes that seems to come with each Show HN thread. Like, a 5+ long-ish-paragraph wall of text.
It is often dense, rich, so I’m not criticising, but sometimes really feels like a lot to digest, at least for me.
Do you really always read all the text before you click on the link?
- pvg 3y agoYou must have had a strange run of Show HN's. Most have very short descriptions or no descriptions at all, you can check that by clicking around https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/show
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoProbably selection bias... Thanks!
- pvg 3y agoA very common pattern is something like a link to a github page where the readme describes the thing generally and a short (can really be down to a sentence or so) Show HN description that's addressed to HN readers, something like 'I've was interested in/wanted to build/etc X, and made this over the last few weeks'. It does enough to set expectations, describe the motivation and tell everyone you're around to respond to feedback. But there's really not much reason to think about this too much, just go ahead and post your thing with whatever description (or none) you want.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ano-ther 3y agoI normally go by the title, but a little (and brief) explanation is nice. Not longer than what you wrote above. - a short summary of what this is (am I interested?) - intended use case / users (is it for me?) - unfinished work (where to not complain?) - a question (where can I help?)
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoThat's super helpful. Thank you!