4 ms·
It’s getting pretty annoying that Marco is consistently able to recap yesterday’s top tech news item, add no insight, and hit the top of HN. Or am I missing so
by alanh 14y ago
It’s getting pretty annoying that Marco is consistently able to recap yesterday’s top tech news item, add no insight, and hit the top of HN.
Or am I missing something? Is there value added in this process? Or do these concerns end up reaching a much wider audience?
- debacle 14y agoWe like rehashing old news to feel better about ourselves. Put another, less inflammatory way, Hacker News tends very highly towards the ephemeral. I would argue certainly more highly than reddit and possibly even more highly than something like 4chan. This creates a detrimental effect because the discussion around these news stories is more long-lived than HN (the discussion vector) would let us believe. This creates something I'd call the Hacker News Timeshift - blogspam based on yesterday's news purely on the off chance that the generated blog post will act as a vector for spurring the truncated discussion, thus generating plenty of ancillary or almost coincidental traffic to the blogspam. Anyone who visits the new stories page once a day will see this effect in action for roughly 50% of the stories that were on the news page yesterday.
- frou_dh 14y agoNice observation. I buy it, but question how often authors have that specific intent in mind vs. unaffiliated submitters and voters creating the narratives with what they can find. Who knows? There's a chance Madonna^WMarco himself might not be targeting the HN masses with his latest post. Regardless, it's finally dawning on me that the never-ending stream of Apple punditry is a fucking bore, including the "high quality" sources in the echo-chamber such as DF and 5by5.
- debacle 14y agoHacker News, in general, is a fucking bore. The nice thing about being random access is that you can be highly selective in both the stories that you read and the discussions you participate in.
- prawn 14y agoI'm happy to keep seeing this as a top-ranked story if it puts quick pressure on Apple and encourages more people to think about account security.
- wonderzombie 14y agoPeople like to hear about Apple stuff. People like to hear about security stuff. And Marco has name recognition, so maybe people who wouldn't otherwise take a second look come by, upvote, and comment.
- unreal37 14y agoIt's not annoying (to me) since I happen to like Marco. But I do notice a pattern. (a) story happens (b) it makes HN (c) marco makes a one or two sentence comment on it (d) his comment makes HN. Similar to the way Daring Fireball blogs about Apple stories, except he doesn't make HN as much.
- madethemcry 14y agoI totally agree with you. No added value at all and that applies to most of his posts.