Posting to HN is like exposing yourself to the eye of Mordor
I see great projects here on HN every day, but we are a species which loves cynicism. The comment threads can be especially hard on authors.
To all the creators out there, I salute you.
To all the creators out there, I salute you.
128 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] thread"fair and balanced"?
My various attempts to post an Ask or Show HN have mostly gone unnoticed. I think it would be great if there were a place that Ask / Show / Tell / etc. posts could get more traction in general.
I normally never visit it, but it is available.
Therein lies the problem :) It doesn't matter if the parent visits it, if no one else does.
I try to make it a point to visit the /newest page, and find that I have disproportionate influence on the content of Hacker News as a result. At slow times, it only takes about 3-4 votes in quick succession for a story to crack the top 30 on the front page. If a story is sitting on /newest with 3 votes, you can be the one that starts a voting cascade that brings it to the top. And as an added bonus, if you add an insightful comment, you can rake in hundreds of karma points as your comment is the first thing that thousands of readers see.
1 = http://nathanael.hevenet.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker...
If you continue reading, it also states that to maximize time on the front page, submitting between 8-9 PM EST is optimal.
It concludes with an overall optimal posting time of 9-10 AM EST, or 7AM - noon more generally.
[1]: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ
My guess is that luck as a great deal to do with it.
HN has become pretty useless for posting projects since the site has become so large. It's a shame, because this my favorite part of the site.
Simply posting with the "Show HN: " prefix puts you on a couple of twitter feeds/meta-sites. Reddit is normally a better option, because you can post to the niche subreddits and get a bit of interest, even if you don't hit the front page of the whole site (good luck with that, if it's not an image).
Might be an idea to add an option to separate out the journeys into bus/tube/OG lines since the TfL Route Planner sometimes give strange routes when all mixed together?
Edit: Silly typo's
I'll have a look at adding some options for customising journey types.
Very true. I announced a new javascript storefront the other month with Show HN. It got four upvotes and 1400 unique visitors in the first few hours, almost all from automatic Show HN aggregators.
I normally do a quick scan of the front page, and then go the "New" page. I find stories there that are quite interested but failed to show up on front page due to the lack of upvotes.
edit: better context.
AND USUALLY IT IS NOT GOOD.
(end quote)
Truly hilarious jokes, on the other hand, are highly upvoted.
There's nothing worse than throwing good at a bad idea only to one day realize you've wasted your time, money, and effort.
If one cynical comment is enough to derail your ambitions, you shouldn't be doing a startup.
The problem I see is that OPs tend to receive a reliable and sustained torrent of cynicism, and little else. Sure, there is value in those comments, and often super enlightening exchanges, but the default attitude of being the smartest-guy-in-the-room can get exhausting and counter-productive. Oftentimes would-be worthwhile discussion get buried or passed up for a bitter exchange with both parties just trying to prove their intellectual worth and cleverness.
- I don't think it's fair to call people out publicly (or necessary). Especially as they are unlikely to see my comment and have the opportunity to defend themselves.
- I don't tell myself anything of the sort.
The fact is, building something is hard. Criticizing something is easy. There's no special skill involved in picking apart somebody's project, making a big deal out of what is otherwise a minor flaw, and using that to dismiss that guy's work. That was a great way to make myself feel better about the fact that someone else built something, and I didn't.
There are also a lot of people who are just giving their honest reply.
Key is to tell who is who. Someone who just rants and rants about how bad it is, versus someone who's giving some useful criticism.
Its hard when you've worked on something and then your post gets trolled to death by a 12 yr old who has a strong opinion.
As much as I hate how direct they are, the comments are often true. I just wished the criticisms were more constructive at times.
That's a common belief, but I've noticed that Reddit has recently been giving higher-quality comments than HN. Take a look:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5745707
vs
http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1es4pf/soylent_t...
The Reddit comments are either positive, or they're skeptical in a way that doesn't try to force their opinion on you. They say things like "Hey, I noticed no one at Soylent seems to have a background in nutrition" rather than "I beg you, don't fund these guys! What they're doing is inherently dangerous." (The latter was actually a very common theme in the comments here about Soylent.)
The problem is that people such as yourself make the world a worse place to live in and to experience. There's more to life than technology and business.
congratulations on accomplishing writing the comment, have a cookie.
why am i so lonely.
Constructive criticism, preferably actionable feedback, is one thing. Saying "you suck" is quite another.
I'm reminded of an old saying, which goes something like (paraphrasing here): "Everyone has their own battles to fight. Be kind to everyone, for you know not what battle they are fighting".
Besides, it doesn't cost any extra to be polite and reasonable, versus being inflammatory and attacking.
you shouldn't care if someone is a dick, what you should care is if he's right.
And yet, when someone offends you or attacks you, people are unlikely to take them seriously.
I feel that if you want to have your ego stroked and have some exposure for your project, the best place to post it would be somewhere like Reddit. If you want to show some good minds in the field and get valuable advice, then post it here.
But what about: "Why do I have to login to Facebook to see this?", "There are too many typos for this to be taken seriously?", "The font/colors are really hard to read", "It's broken in Firefox", "Facebook tried this in 2009 and they had [such and such] kinds of problems, what are you doing differently?"
I dunno...Maybe people have different expectations when doing a "Show HN?" If you've worked hard on something, of course you should be encouraged ...but if you're pitching it as a viable startup idea...then you, IMO, shouldn't just want "atta boy/girl" comments...constructive criticism now could save you a lot of pain later on.
Fuck you, by the way.
Just watching a feel-good cartoon flick with the kids (Ratatouille) and there's this little gem at the end. I'd like to meet the guy who wrote that in. It sums it all up right there.
Ratatouille was the first Pixar movie I saw that was an utter disappointment (no, I haven't seen them all, but I've seen a fair number of them). It was so far from "feel-good" cartoon flick for me. Much more "I'll never get that two hours of my life back" movie. Not sure how close to two hours it actually was, but it felt like about 10 hours.
Not sure what they were smoking when they made that one. I realize that tastes in movies vary widely, but I still find it hard to believe that people actually like that movie.
To each his own, I guess.
I do this for a living, and having been on the creative side I'm always very careful to concentrate on giving positive feedback rather than negative feedback. I notice that lots of times the people in my line of work that have never actually created much can be picked out easily by the way in which they relentlessly try to tear everything down, often quite successfully.
It is almost as if they don't realize that to criticize is 100 times easier than to create and they don't give a rat's ass (pun intended) about the consequences.
HN has a lot of that, de-constructive criticism, just to tear everything down that's new to prove the critic is better than the ones that built whatever it is that is on display. And I think that's where the eye of Mordor reference comes from above, it certainly looks like that at times.
Creation, any kind of creation is hard. And to create something perfect the first time out is impossible. So constructive criticism is worth gold, demotivation is lethal.
If a work is particularly bad, I'll generally just leave it alone, unless the artist has presented something that is obviously cynical and pandering, or otherwise obviously derivative and parasitic on the work of better artists. In those cases I might get slightly snarky. I try to control this and tone it down, because even derivative works are risks, and usually somewhat naive.
If the artists' ambitious goals weren't met, and I think I understand them, I try to lay this out in as constructive a manner as I can.
I can usually only accomplish good criticism by immersion -- repeated (dozens of) listens to a record for instance, over a period of days, writing/typing out lyrics by hand, listening to all the artist's previous records, reading as many interviews as I can and just trying to get my head in the "space" of the record. At some point I get to a place of sympathy where I get into the "soul" of the record and I really have something to say, that isn't just a first impression, nor a knee-jerk reaction, but as close to deep understanding as I can get. It's really hard work, even for just a 150 word review (which is one reason I don't do it often any more).
It's rare to get that kind of perspective on a HN comment, "Show HN", or some blog post linked here. But even with the noise that's emerged over the last few years as HN has grown, I can still find the really constructive comments and learn as much as I always have. I just have to look past the frustrating drive-by comments, the throw-away accounts and the axes-to-grind. The signal-to-noise isn't what it used to be, but in general there's just as much signal, but a lot more noise to have to overlook.
As someone who goes out of his way to comment on every Show HN thread he sees, I believe most users are not cynical. I can see why most people could be considered harsh; this is why I try to specifically say I'm being constructive.
I think the best way to go about giving feedback is to start with the negatives (the most glaring, preferably) and then end on a positive note with what the developer is doing properly. This tells the creators that they're doing good work and that they shouldn't abandon their babies (yet), they might just need to tweak things here and there.
Conversely, tearing someone to pieces is mean and not productive, even if the points are valid. There are arguments for this that generally go along the lines of some Darwinian thinking where they shouldn't even be trying if they can't take criticism - that's unrealistic and unfair to expect of people. We all need to start somewhere. Help out fellow members.
Hacker News is not a trial by fire - nor is it meant to encourage a death march. Those are two extremes. A comfortable middle ground where both criticism and praise are given is optimum. And I find there is rarely a submission so bad there's nothing good to be said about if at all.
[1]http://calhoun137.github.com/animator
To make it less unfair regarding valuable submission, check /news frequently and upvote submission you consider of value.