Why is it so that every so often one of these feel-good LinkedIn-style posts make it to the front page? Is there so much demand for banality on this site? I come here to read good tech articles or articles that stimulate my curiosity and it is sad to see these articles upvoted to the top when so many other good articles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest continue to languish.
Simplicity bias, kind of like "bikeshedding". A large number of people can read this quickly, agree with it, and upvote it. Whereas articles about optimising machine code for the Apple Silicon CPU, or "Risks to the Glen Canyon Dam" are a lot more niche.
Personally, I follow specific people who regularly submit interesting content, and pay less attention to the homepage.
In the true HN spirit, I have a little script goes through the Hacker News API and shows them as an RSS feed. But if you'd rather use something off-the-shelf there's https://hnrss.org/submitted?id=synergy20
Welcome. Don't worry too much, have fun, remove emotion out of the equation, be consistent, fire-n-forget. The side effect of it is then the Karma keep growing on its own. But don't worry too much about that - not worth it.
Mine was just about 10K+ before the Pandemic. Then, I found the fun part, the rhythm, and then it has grown since then.
I do that (maybe not the consistent part, I do go days without making any comments sometimes), I don't karma farm, or worry about it or anything. But it's impossible not to notice the number in the top right from time to time (also usually my clue to check for responses to my comments).
I just assumed it was on the higher end on this site (like top 10-15%), based on the several dozen other profiles I've looked at. Seems I might be further down than I assumed, is all.
I have become somewhat… jaded, in my view of the current tech scene.
I’m sure that some of it is just sour grapes, on my part, but that doesn’t make the problem any less real.
I don’t really feel like going through my posting history, but there’s been a number of times that I’ve been “OK, Boomer”ed, here (I suspect that you’d need to turn on I See Dead Posts to catch most).
I’ve learned to accept the SillyCon Valley ageism, but it still pisses me off, to see the awful results of disastrous decisions made by folks without experience. Many of these jackpots were entirely predictable, to anyone with scars.
If it were just the Principals, getting hurt, I wouldn’t mind so much, but the blast radius tends to include a lot of collateral damage.
Huh. I'm assuming that it's this reply that earned the thread a closure. As far as I know, it wasn't flagged (but I may not know that). It still has positive karma.
Was it because I mentioned a particular HN setting?
I would certainly appreciate knowing what I did to earn the Ire of The Gods.
I doubt it was mentioning ageism. We talk about that, all the time, and some folks get pretty insulting about it, without getting dinged.
I've absolutely no idea about the closure, et al. I also don't flag or downvote anything on HackerNews. But hey, between you and me, I love reading your comment. Thanks.
I think it's similar to a well shared meme, or a self help book. Sometimes something (simple/banal(!)) just encapsulates the way a lot of people are thinking or feeling but haven't managed to verbalise. You read it and think "huh, that's very true," come back to HN and vote it up. The fact other people are doing the same is a nice justification that you're not alone in feeling that way, particularly in the midst of a crowd of high achievers.
Indeed. I think it fulfills some sort of social need to read/hear back my own thinking in slightly different and often more coherent words. It gives me a feeling of being understood, which is of course sort of artificial when writer of the text is someone who doesn't even know who I am.
It feels sort of related to the technique therapists seem to use; based on patient's rambling stories, they summarize how they feel in much more succinct way than they themselves would have been able to, which makes them feel like they are finally being understood, which often results in tears.
If anything the original post looks like the very antithesis of a typical linkedin post which is overboard with enthusiasm and positivity (to the point of being nauseating) and devoid of even a hint of introspection or a reality check. Maybe it's just our linkedin networks and personalizations are very different... who knows?
I didn't upvote or submit this article, but my answer to your question is that this site serves a wide audience and not everyone shares your preferences.
When I hit that link half are flagged dead, I see one directly from LinkedIn, and most are not hard tech articles but rather something tech adjacent such as about soft skills or selling tech.
It's good advice, pointing out a very hard-to-grasp aspect of human nature.
Here's a question for you. Why, if /newest is meeting your needs, did you feel the need to make this comment, hoping to adjust HN's sorting behavior for the front page?
You, and everyone who upvoted this to make this the top comment on this post, are making the exact same mistake pointed out by the linked article.
I follow /best through RSS and I upvote every single post that I looked at the comments for. Even if I think it's dumb and disagree with it (like in this case), it made me interested in what other people think of it, so it provides value.
Why is this the top comment (at time of writing)? It makes no reference to the actual content, just complaining that the article was on the frontpage.
I personally enjoyed reading the sentiment of the article and don't mind it being on the frontpage. But I would never think of writing a comment complaining that the article wasn't on the frontpage.
Why should the frontpage content only make you happy? This made me happy, so I was glad it was on the frontpage.
I guess the comment could also be juxtaposition on the headline: stop acting like you're famous.
At first I thought it's generally good and can help with perfectionism and apathy, but the completely unnecessary plug of Grammarly put it in question. I'm on mobile but if there is any analytics tracking views (hard to say if it is server side) then surely the author gets paid
(For context, I was triggered since I know the likes of Grammarly, NordVPN and similar are absolute beasts in getting plugs from people with any sort of following in any niche)
HN is a comment site masquerading as a news site. A large percentage of commenters go directly to the comments without ever reading the article. They just want an excuse to spout their opinions.
And to read the opinions that other HNers spout. The comments are often better than the articles. Also, I know I'll be able to read them without fending off popups and dark patterns.
We can debate if comments are more informative than articles and sometimes they are. Many times they are not, especially if you happen to be a SME.
Sometimes I wonder why I continue to read reddit, the signal/noise raise is very low, but when you get that 1 informative or insightful comments out of a sea of garbage, it keeps you going for awhile.
Same here. The top comment we're discussing is a good example of comments I really dislike :/ people think that only things they find interesting should be upvoted by everyone else :D that kind of thinking, which is very common in HN comments, shows just how much one can lack understanding of others, their motivations, how people's tastes/objectives/world views can be completely and utterly different than their own.
I agree with the top comment but it's not for lack of understanding but for a lamentation of how this place is similar to any other social network like internet place overwhelmed with solipsistic banality.
Just look at how many comments around the site are personal anecdotes tangentially related to whatever the post is.
> The top comment we're discussing is a good example of comments I really dislike :/
As a revealed preference, no, you don't. It's trivially easy to collapse a comment you genuinely don't like, which would mean you wouldn't be posting in its replies more than halfway down.
Funny you say that. I do often go to the comments because some of the people commenting here on HN are famous. If not famous they are more involved in IT or other industries at a high level.
I know I'm a nobody but it's interesting to read comments some are better than the linked articles.
As an old Slashdot user with a low user ID, I disagree. Not RTFA was definitely scorned as it was on the Usenet. But you had limited ability to vote people down, so perhaps it appeared more socially acceptable.
There's always been a place for the occasional self-help or inspirational article on HN. I think there's probably a bit less of it than there used to be.
If you see good articles on /newest that are languishing, please upvote them!
...and if there's a really good one that hasn't had attention, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can consider putting it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). Especially if it's not an article you have any personal connection to—we'll appreciate the nomination a lot more if it's motivated by curiosity rather than self-promotion.
I think the tech industry has also changed over time. I joined just as the iPhone and thus smartphone apps became a thing, but we just haven’t seen shakeups like social media, cloud computing, web frameworks, etc recently.
Crypto is effectively dead, LLM’s ended up mostly hype with limited utility, so what’s there to talk about? Random interesting side projects, retro technology, random science stuff, a bit of news, etc and that’s what HN front page looks like.
