4 ms·
It can be pure chance. Who commented first, who happened to click the article, the time of day it was posted, the style of the website the article was hosted on
by szvsw 2y ago
It can be pure chance. Who commented first, who happened to click the article, the time of day it was posted, the style of the website the article was hosted on, etc etc. it’s easy to get sucked into the illusion that the commenting population is a stationary distribution when in fact it might be highly multimodal and each thread is not a representative sample of the overall population.
Having said that, your question still stands, I suppose I’m just thinking it ought to be phrased differently? why does one article trigger more engagement than others, and why does one article trigger more engagement with certain subsets of the HN population? (Whereas your phrasing could seem to suggest there are monolithic grand narratives that describe what “The HN community thinks”)
- ricksunny 2y ago>chance Yes I suppose I should find some serenity in the pure chance of things. >monolithic Yes it would be unfair of me to interrogate as if the comment-base was a monolithic whole. So perhaps not monolithic, but still probably manifesting more shared responses to stimuli than the wider population at large. I definitely feel there's a distinct HN 'meta-personality', as I believe another replier re. organelles was alluding to. While forum moderation probably also shapes that to a degree, the meta-personality feels more the result of shared professional technical training (and knowing that others in the community are of like training, very very broadly speaking).