HN: The Good Parts (2017)

I second Dan's advice of blogging more. I'm a very average HN commenter. I do put in effort in writing here, trying to be civil above all and sharing my experience where it could be of interest. But I'm not Alan Kay, I've never rewritten a distributed deep learning system in Haskell using a genetically optimized Paxos consensus protocol, and my entrepreneurial experience is a loose string of "don't do this" case studies at best... So my comments certainly won't…

PG's essay "What I've Learned From Hacker News"[0] is on point: COMMENTS: Bad comments seem to be a harder problem than bad submissions. While the quality of links on the frontpage of HN hasn't changed much, the quality of the median comment may have decreased somewhat. There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. There is a lot of overlap between the two—mean comments are disproportionately likely also to be dumb—but the strategies for dealing with…

I think besides dang and other moderators who keep the site somewhat cleaned up through brute force, the fact that HN discourages flashy features and headache-inducing levels of information density and imagery helps to keep a core audience present, unlike most other platforms that start out simple then quickly pile on feature after feature that make the original audience depart.

Yes but the comments that I make ... :-) Edit: I watched a documentary on the making of QI - a British TV quiz where the questions or answers are supposed to be "Quite Interesting". And the commentator pointed out that they have changed the sort of facts they bring into the show - in the early years it was all "you might think X but really it's Y". But there are a limited number of "common misapprehensions", and the…