Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderMost of the comments here are either elaborating on the OP, or justify lurking. I am a mostly-lurker myself, but I felt the need to comment here, since I was hoping to see the discussion go into a different direction. The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. They might have an interesting…
Over the past year I've slowly started to realize this as well. What changed? Working for a company that is publicly known enough for people on HN (and Reddit) to comment about it. It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things like they are facts. In this case, it's easy for me to recognize they are wrong. But what about other topics (or companies) I don't know…
My gut feeling is that most of the comments on Reddit are written by teenagers. In the real world there are plenty of context clues that I use to determine if someone is worth listening to or not. On the internet, you have to assume in good faith that a given comment was written by someone who has enough life experience to be taken seriously.
I would agree to a certain point, but I wouldn't take the "all people is crazy" too seriously, given the growing number of confirmed to be true -previously tin-foil hat- theories. Remember the "the government is intercepting EVERYTHING worldwide" from the 2000s? Awesome, I didn't thought it was feasible to do actually, but there are some quite smart(er) folks out there. Remember that at some point many people knowing first-hand untold no-public truths started to share bits here and there…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 3
- Total points
- 1413
- Total comments
- 721
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-10-28 | Most of what you read on the internet is written by outliers | jxub | 1 | 0 |
| 2019-01-11 | Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane PeopleFirst breakout · Best thread | unquote | 718 | 309 |
| 2020-07-02 | Most of What You Read on the Internet Is Written by Insane People | Reedx | 9 | 2 |
| 2021-01-01 | Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people (2018) | zuhayeer | 539 | 328 |
| 2022-09-19 | Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people (2018)Hall induction · Latest 20+ point return | thunderbong | 140 | 81 |
| 2025-12-10 | Most of What You Read on the Internet Is Written by Insane People (2018) | sph | 6 | 1 |