For me, HN has had one very big, very concrete effect: it's forced me to write more. Not write well, necessarily. Not edit, unfortunately. But write. Before I s

For me, HN has had one very big, very concrete effect: it's forced me to write more. Not write well, necessarily. Not edit, unfortunately. But write. Before I started commenting here, I only ever wrote coherently for school and never liked it. Now, after quite a bit of practice, I'm much more comfortable getting my ideas across. This reminds me of "How to Write without Writing"[1] by Jeff Atwood. He explains how StackOverflow tricks programmers into writing more and therefore improving. While I love StackOverflow, I think Hacker News does this much better: StackOverflow posts tend to be too short and too technical, while HN posts are all over the place. HN also gives much more direct feedback: in my experience, voting is correlated with how well a comment is written and people's responses to a comment show where it was effective and where it could have been clearer. [1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/02/how-to-write-without-writing.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/02/how-to-write-withou... Hacker News made writing a game, and playing that game really helped me write.