4 ms·
unfortunately it wasn't a test, there was no if. I knew it would work. see the link at the bottom of my post, to the summon monsters post, explaining the inevit
by giles_bowkett 18y ago
unfortunately it wasn't a test, there was no if. I knew it would work. see the link at the bottom of my post, to the summon monsters post, explaining the inevitable signal/noise decline. the tactic will become more effective as time goes on, and PHP dominating the top stories told me the decline had progressed. (I had returned to the site after a prolonged hiatus.)
it's not contemptuous, although it may seem contemptible. I just did the math, knew the tactic would become infallible over time, and used it when signs indicated it would succeed.
of course this implicitly challenges your statement that the site's the same as it ever was. I actually don't have any proof to back that up. I think it would actually be reallllllllllllllllly hard to quantify. I could say there's a frog in boiling water effect there, but then there's the possibility that HN aka News.YC simply had a bad day yesterday, and if I had chosen another day for my random return, I could have come away with the impression it was improving.
- ryanwaggoner 18y agounfortunately it wasn't a test, there was no if. I knew it would work. Ah, the classic claim that there was never any doubt of success. Always works best after the fact.
- ahoyhere 18y agoNota bene: You may think what I'm about to write has something to do with your last name, but I'm not that funny. HN is very predictable, in some ways. It's not predictable with 100% accuracy like digg or reddit. But, still, HN people have a group identity to a large degree. And if you attack that group identity, the group is interested in the attack and they are ready to circle the wagons. Both interest and wagon-circling in this context mean upvoting so other people see it. Hasn't just about everything Giles' written about HN come up on the front page?
- petercooper 18y agoI just knew you were going to say that!
- giles_bowkett 18y agoheh. got me
- rms 18y agoMostly HN has just gotten bigger. This means that bad comments and bad posts happen more often than they used to. But good discussion also happens more often than ever.
- fhars 18y agoOT, but the boiling frog myth is just that: a myth. http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp
- silentbicycle 18y agoIt's an incredibly useful metaphor, though.
- rsheridan6 18y agoNo it's not. Snopes just doesn't know how to do a literature search for anything that hasn't been written in English and more recently than 1997. http://books.google.com/books?id=Hr0aAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA300&vq=frog&dq=The+New+Psychology&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0 http://books.google.com/books?id=Hr0aAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA300&#...
- gravitycop 18y agoThank for pointing that out. From your Google Books links: How great the just perceptible change can be made to become by making the rate of change extremely slow is a matter that still remains for investigation. It is worthy of note that it has been found possible in 5.25 hours to crush a frog's foot, without a sign that the pressure was felt, by screwing down a button at the rate of 0.03 mm per minute. A similar experiment showed that a live frog can actually be boiled without a movement if the water is heated slowly enough; in one experiment the temperature was raised at the rate of 0.002 Celsius per second, and the frog was found dead at the end of 2.5 hours without having moved.(1) If a frog can be crushed or boiled without any evidence that he has noticed it, it is at least an interesting question of what can be accomplished in this direction with human beings. (1) The literature on these experiments with frogs includes Heinzmann, Euber die Wirkung sehr allmaliger Aenderungen thermischer Reize auf die Empfindungsnerven, "Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol." (Pfluger), 1872, vi. 222. Fratscher, Euber continuirliche und langsame Nervenreizung, "Jenaische Zeitschrift," 1875, N. F. ii. 130. Sedgwick, On the Variation of Reflex Excitability in the Frog induced by changes of Temperature, "Stud. Biol. Lab., Johns Hopkins Univ.," 1882, 385.
- greendestiny 18y agoDoes this mean the content of your post is a joke? Can someone just delete the link and we can move on.
- rsheridan6 18y agoThere was enough of interest in the post - about the inherent brokenness of social news - to make it worth upvoting without paying attention to the "HN sucks." That Garfield submission on the front page, OTOH...