We've all run into this problem at some point: We sincerely want to put something out on the web that people will link to, helping us generate ad revenue. But not all of us have something useful or meaningful to say. This is something you can overcome if you just put a little pluck and perserverance into it. Here's what some others had to say...
howtosplitanatom.com - "A good approach for me has been to identify a universal problem and get my friends to relay truisms about said problem. If they're not available, I can Google up a list in less than 10 minutes!"
zenhabits.net - "Pasting universal truisms is great, but I like to throw a little twist in by enumerating them."
And remember to make sure to network with other vacuous blogs so you can upvote each other and downvote the competition on social sites. Happy po$ting!
I actually upmodded this because I think it might be worthy of note. All snark aside, "universal" as it may be it's the simple stuff that people deal with everyday that has meaning to them.
Not every post can be a treatise on HMM based speech analysis. Nor should it be.
As always, if something isn't meaningful to you - no one forces you to read it. If you had suggestions for stories you feel are more interesting, feel free to reach out to me (I can't speak for Zenhabits, but I imagine they would say similar).
The problem is, as always, that the members of the community that post the best stories and comments start to disappear when the front page becomes stupid. How's that for "no one forces you to read it"?
I agree that not every post should be a discussion on the problems and merits of academic subjects, but every post should be interesting enough that the smart guys here want to read it: be that a PG essay, a story telling that Prosper verifies that poor people must have high interest rates or this year's Berkshire Hathaway letter to shareholders. Boilerplate news can be found anywhere, whereas a highly concentrated feed of stories is a precious rarity.
Kaczynski was just a dedicated psycho whose only hack was to show how hard it can be for society to deal with people like him. He may have dicked around with math a little but to call him "brilliant" is a mistake along the lines of Clarke's third law.
Tell that to the families? Traces of sarcasm aside, police analysis showed him to have intelligence significantly above average. Sorry if you have a loftier value for the word 'brilliant'.
My 2 cents: I think you're overreacting and being a bit melodramatic by "leaving" and going out of your way to make a post about it instead of, say, just not voting up or reading posts you aren't interested in (or just leaving). It's not like your sentiment isn't expressed in some way already several times a week. The only thing more annoying to me than noise is noise about noise. Yes, I see the irony in my saying that.
I'm sorry to seem melodramatic, but I didn't feel like I was only speaking for myself, and I hadn't yet seen a post like this. For a while I thought others were overreacting when they were saying that HN was changing too much, but lately I think I know what they're talking about. Several times I've clicked through and read about half of a story only to find that it was a waste of my time, and judging by the names on the comments, most of the story's score is coming from new members.
I'm not saying the community isn't good for a lot of people, I'm just saying that it's changed enough that it's no longer what I came here for. I would apologize for making this submission, but it seems that enough people agreed with me that it did make it to the front page.
Every new xkcd gets posted and voted up here... even the bad ones. Maybe s/he doesn't like the hero worship and voted down the comments because there's no way to vote down the post. Kinda cheap, but there you go.
