Top Hacker News commenters of 2021
whaly.ioThis only measures the number of comments; it would be interesting to know the karma difference accrued in a year. It may produce the exact same ranking, as intuitively karma is probably heavily correlated with comment frequency... but maybe not?
Karma in my experience has a lot more to do with comment tone and with reading the room well than with the quality of the comment's content. I accumulated I think about 500-600 karma in 2021, but most of that was just me saying stuff that a lot of people in the thread wanted to believe is true. On the other hand I lost a lot of karma from comments that had the same quality or higher in terms of content, but where I was contemptuous or dismissive or flippant in tone, or just went against the grain. I guess even smart nerds are bland herd normies for the most part
It's worse than that, karma is mostly about location location location.
You're talking about probability of upvote, but that needs to be multiplied by the number of people who read the comment, and that depends heavily on where it is on the comment page itself. When I look at my karma on my recent comments they have very little to do with how much time I spent on them or how unique my perspective is... I even wonder if that aspect is gameable sometimes, whether you could guess the probability that with your upvote a comment that has been recently posted 5 minutes ago could be boosted above the top comment posted 5 hours ago, and if the 15 minute ago one was interesting enough maybe it would be self-sustaining up there, and you could potentially produce the second comment in the page by replying to it. But that's a lot of math when probably if you're trying to optimize karma/comment there are better heuristics, “always comment on any post that is on the front page with < 20 points and < 20 comments” or so, just increasing volume of things that are probably in the right place to be upvoted.
Which all adds up to, karma doesn't mean shit. We already knew that, but it not matter because lizard brain like see number go up
Every community is bound to contain some bias, that is unavoidable. But at least "nerds" or the more educated are bound to decrease this human error with a more "peer-reviewed" process in curating information, that is one purpose of HN.
Just looking through the top of the list I see a lot of usernames that I'm not familiar with and some of the more recognizable users further down. There is definitely a significant difference between comment count and karma.
There's an all-time karma list as a feature of the board. https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Karma is interesting. But also comment length. A short comment like mine is much less effort than a well thought out proper in-depth answer.
I have made into the top 10k... This definitely means that I'm spending way too much time here and need to cut back!
Hmm, I feel the same :s
For me it's a sign that I need to change something at work, I often flee here because I am making powerpoints, I'd never do it so much if I was writing code more often. At least, that is what I believe.
HN does give me back a lot though: Being understood, by like minded people, confirmation of my opinions that are just too different from my group of friends (none have ever for example installed Linux, or tried to run their own cloud services). I feel at home here. It could be called addiction, it's also just finding a community where you can express thoughts you can't express anywhere else, and expect to have interactions based on those thoughts. I've often changed my mind or apologized for being a dick here, I don't want to be banned but I want to validate and invalidate my believes and it works for me, I hope I provide value for others as well. Maybe I have an HN shaped hole in my heart?
It would really scare me if dang wasn't the first one. But at the same time, I feel immense pain thinking about what he has to deal with on a daily basis. Literally the entire functioning of the last somewhat civil, fully moderated, independent, anon-friendly board on the internet in 2021 on the shoulders of one admin. I'd like to say how a million flowers should bloom from this shining example, but it seems more like a superhuman attempt to hold back the flood.
In any event, it's been worth it and it's been a job well done.
Also, I'm surprised and a bit ashamed to be #415 in this list. That's probably a whole side-project's worth of time I could have spent elsewhere. But I guess we all need somewhere to commune, talk shop, make friends or blow off some steam. FWIW I've learned far more from HN in the last year than I've been able to bring to it, and I'm thankful for the avenues it leads me down every day as a reader. I would post a lot less if I stopped drinking but, yeah.
> [...] on the shoulders of one admin
Actually, there are multiple admins. See his response to my question here [0].
That's, of course, not to distract from his great work; as I've stated multiple times already, I really think HN is one of the best moderated communities overall.
By now, there should be enough data to automate dang? On a more serious note: Is he really doing this all by himself? If so, I am sure he could train some junior people to off-load the work.
Proper moderation requires strength of character to moderate evenly people you do and do not agree with. Not something you can impart on others, even less so on juniors.
Being a waiter, working in a casino, being a cab driver, and running a coffee shop... you know, the secret to banning people is that you're always fair and more equitable than everyone else who's screaming, so when you do finally do it, everyone is either happy or scared they'll be next. People are surprisingly easy to manipulate this way. It would be wonderful if more sites activated that part of people's fear-lizard-brain more often; good manners are partly taught and partly enforced.
Yes you're right that it requires strength. And, at the same time, people have been training other people in every profession to do their jobs for ages. It's how we have survived and thrived as a species.
Ok. But where does one learn this strength, and subtlety? This is an amazing idea. For me it was as a waiter, and a taxi driver. Lots of people are assholes, but they're all people. You have to treat them with respect; but you have to be willing to ban them. How do you teach such a thing? Okay. Here's my great idea. Let's make a site where people can mod HN. Use an algorithm to coach them to be better moderators. Train them to learn patience.
How long do you think it would take to write that? How good do you think your trainees would be in the real world? Or would it just be better to have someone go live in the world for a long time?
If so... doesn't that mean it's a rarely acquired skill?
I was thinking that dang is going to be one of the most represented voices in GPT-4 and later. Hopefully you can retrieve him from the mix by nickname.
>> I am sure he could train some junior people to off-load the work.
I'm sure he does, and I don't know. But that way lies every other site on the internet...
> Literally the entire functioning of the last somewhat civil, fully moderated, independent, anon-friendly board on the internet in 2021
I recognize an hyperbole when I see one, but this one is kinda of a big one.
To be honest, This is definitely more civil than other forums on the internet which have essentially become silos of their political leaning.
Even the people who disagree with you here are polite. There are your occasional reddit-style "cool" sounding snarky comments every now and then. But decent overall
Name one that's apolitical, anonymous, and personally moderated post by post? Some reddit subs might fit the bill, or some car enthusiast forums or something where wide-ranging conversations are banned. But this is a hard, hard thing to mod. I don't think we have anything else like it these days. That's why I'm actually here.
r/science is not that bad, well moderated...I know it because I was banned there quite fast for not being scientific enough :)
Though the psychology part of r/science is too much, much less scientific and more biased to a political view
A life of banning and being banned makes you who you are today. It's called civilization. And of course, when you get your first lesson you yell about other people having bent a rule or two; then later bending some rules is something you earn as a privilege. I was an angry child in the 80s ;)
> Name one that's apolitical, anonymous, and personally moderated post by post?
There are literally millions of forums out there.
On any topic.
Even simply statistically speaking, there's a ton like that.
There are a few I'm in that really moderate. One is for owners of old Datsuns. One is for pedal steel guitar players ($5 per year, just to keep out the junk). That's okay if you're running a PHP forum with a couple thousand users, a few dozen concurrents at most. Modding this thing as one or a few people? That's a whole 'nother animal.
> Modding this thing as one or a few people? That's a whole 'nother animal
But does this make HN truly unique?
I don't think it does.
If the OP said "among the forums I'm in HN is the only one that ..." I'd have nothing to object.
To me it's the one thing that truly does. I've been here ten years and I think the moderation is the unsung reason it's survived and manages to keep going. It's actually not obvious at all how personal and deep the moderation is until you get on the wrong side of it. If you've never been banned, it's like the invisible protocol that keeps communication flowing smoothly; you don't ask what that protocol is if it doesn't break down. It's quite subtle, at times almost sublime in that it's capable of weighing humanity against dread/mob/internet. So in my observation over many years, I think that is definitely what has made this site unique.
That's rich, HN blocks all posts from VPN and flags all new account posts which are hidden until approved. Like this one.
off the top of my head: metafilter.com, lobste.rs, something awful,
I think tildes, and the main instance of Lemmy count as well.
metafilter is anything but apolitical, they literally ban differences of opinion.
If you want to help you can point out clear-cut guideline violations in a comment, or mail them to dang directly. Just don’t violate the guidelines yourself in the process.
I also prefer to keep the guideline commentary separate from any other matter so as not to dilute the message.
> independent, anon-friendly board on the internet in 2021
There is a lot of stealth censorship on HN that occurs behind the scenes. After I wrote a post that was critical of Stripe, all of my new posts are automatically shadow banned. This place won’t survive for much longer, I don’t think.
Edit: And before dang posts some dumb response, I will tell you that he said “the algorithm” decided that my posts were “self promotion.” Anyway, maybe this is a good way of ending my commenting on this forum — time to help those who want to create something new.
I read your comments as far back as I had the time and most are abrasive. If you tone it down you will find it easier to be heard.
"Also, I'm surprised and a bit ashamed to be #415 in this list."
"humblebrag, transitive + intransitive: to make a seemingly modest, self-critical, or casual statement or reference that is meant to draw attention to one's admirable or impressive qualities or achievements" -- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humblebrag
No, I'm actually both surprised and somewhat ashamed. I wouldn't brag to people here. And I certainly wouldn't mention it to anyone I know in real life. ("What's Hacker News? Oh you're on some internet forum where you have points? Wow.") Is there somewhere deep, deep in my cockles, or sub-cockles, where I'm proud of myself? eh. I don't know. Being ranked definitely rubs me the wrong way. I guess it means some of my late-night missives weren't sent completely into the void.
upvoted, btw. Thanks for making me wonder what kind of asshole I am.
It's a problem that we've made a reasonable amount of bragging into a social error. Your HN rank is in fact a substantive accomplishment, acknowledging that you're in the top small fraction of contributors to one of the most valuable communities on the web. Thank you for making it richer for me. And there's also nothing wrong with speculating about better uses for your time.
I don't think its assholery to make a legit brag or to bow to tall poppy syndrome. I think it's sad that the bow to the all too human neurosis has become required by etiquette.
Does HN have about 10K active users? Then this entire post is more or less clickbait because we are all in here ( I just found myself in the list as well).
More useful is knowing
* What were 2021's most upvoted articles?
* Wat were 20201's most upvoted comments?
You can find answers to the first question here: https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective
And here: https://app.whaly.io/hacker-news/public/report/3596f39c-5a56...
> There was 150k+ active users of Hacker News in 2021 and below is the list of the 10k most active users.[1]
- [1] https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...
I was able to garner some karma in 2021, but being in a Far East timezone seems to be disadvantageous. Basically, much activity appears to happen while North America wakes up in the morning, which is when I am already asleep.
Sometimes I break my vow of online detoxing before sleeping; when I find trending topics related to my domain of knowledge, I frantically respond before the comment section gets too crowded. On the other hand, I can think through more diligently during my noontime, but my effort towards quality commenting is not met by karma from otherwise asleep HNers. It seems like reaping karma is not just about knowing the subject well, but being in the right place at the right time(zone).
This list is ranked by number of comments though, not by karma.
Good catch
Only 70 comments to be in that top 10k. I was expecting more than that.
And it seems that something like the 90-9-1 rule is in effect - with over 7,000 comments, the top non-dang contributor is more than 100x as prolific as contributor #10,000.
Quick calculations... 2735447 total comments in that top 10k.
The top 20 percent represent 1519843 of the total comments, or just over half (55.56 percent).
Though at the top 2k, you're still writing 359 comments per year which is a lot, so I guess the real list going down to comment count = 1 might look a lot more like an 80/20 split.
Would love to know the distribution by karma as well, yeah.
I'm on the list, does this mean I got into YC?
It could be so. IIRC, pg created HN partly to assess how these applicants laid out thoughtful arguments. You gathering much karma may provide leverage when applying to YC.
Would that be an extra reason why you can't delete your account ? :D
You can, you just have to email the mods.
I for one would not object to getting paid for comments. If I had a penny for every shitpost I made on the internet, I'd have tens of thousands of pennies!
After me it seems :p
I think it would be even more interesting to see the list of highest average comment karma or something.
Maybe that would better highlight what I really enjoy with HN: A story about aviation and suddenly 4 airline pilots appear and share insight, or when some tech legend dies and several colleagues pop in and tell stories about them. Or like the other day when one of the authors of the BLAKE3 algorithm (?) participated in some friendly flame-waring.
It would be fun if there were rankings and statistics for karma/upvotes/submissions for all users and from all available years. I'm sure there must be a web page for it somewhere :-) BTW, I barely made it to the list in #9279 with 77 comments. I agree that we're a somewhat niche community here but there are more readers than users and most users just read/vote and rarely submit and comment.
#5!
A lot can be written while waiting for an incremental build to compile
Thanks for all the substantive entertainment everyone
While I have on occasion been given a "stern talking to" by dang, I guess we can all appreciate his work. Though I sometimes wonder when does he sleep.
(Though yes I should probably be more conservative with my comments)
I imagine dang has a series of scripts and programs and works on automating himself out of the need to manually do things.
While it seems like a boring manual job, it’s an interesting job if looked at as an automation problem. The need to automate in a non-stupid way would be good to apply here.
A query on methodology:
Near the end of the list, it’s sitting at around a hundred accounts for each number, yet 70 comments has only 18 accounts listed before the 10000 cutoff is reached. Presumably some 80 or so more accounts were also at 70 comments, but are not mentioned. How wewre items ordered? Not by username, not by creation date, not by karma, I guess it’s just random? Alas for the ~⅘ of the 70-comments-per-year users who were excluded by capricious randomness!
I'd like to thank the academy!
They like you! They really like you!
I like how the article header helpfully offers a 366 minute read time.
I'm also surprised that my name shows up. Like another poster said, small world.
Heh, I came here to lurk for a better slashdot/lower-volume r/programming, but I'm actually in the upper Nk because I get dragged into all kinds of political discussions against the part of my will that I endorse.
It would be nice if there was a "solving the world's problems" tag and an rss feed without it ;)
If OP is here: Would be really great to see each users top comment for the year as well, so we can get an idea of A) what kind of topics they are passionate/knowledgeable about and B) how much of the score for just one comment related to their overall score of the year
Looks like I made spot #844. I already knew I spent too much time on HN, but that seems excessive, so it boggles my mind how anyone could have the time to be in the top 100.
Yeah, the top commentor behind dang is averaging almost 25 comments a day!
Interesting observation: I'm place 3501, I have been reading HN since 2009 and I only recognize 2 handles in the top 10.
I guess this is because HN de-emphasises usernames.
> I guess this is because HN de-emphasises usernames.
Not sure I agree, HN makes the username visible right next to the post? What I think (granted, I grew up with mailing lists and forums without images), is that we're so used to associating people online with pictures nowadays, that when there is no picture, why don't pick up the usernames anymore. Because I do recognize a lot of the usernames in the top 100, some even from just one comment I read but had an impact on me, and my memory made of flesh is really crappy most of the time.
> Not sure I agree, HN makes the username visible right next to the post?
Yes, but grayed out, in the background, so to speak. I usually do not notice the username at all (capableweb, hi! this is the first time I've noticed you...). Especially the usernames next to topics/stories are completely ignored by my brain's eyes.
Interesting that while your brain seems to ignore the usernames, my brain automatically parses the username when reading the comment, somehow. I'm not thinking about it, it just gets associated automatically.
As I mentioned before, I grew up back when the internet was mostly text, so maybe that's why? Are you perhaps a bit younger than that?
> As I mentioned before, I grew up back when the internet was mostly text, so maybe that's why? Are you perhaps a bit younger than that?
I don't think it is age-related, but I was exposed to the web just when AJAX / DHTML / SOAP was taking off (c. 2006/7).
Same. In the top-10, I only recognise vmception and dang.
This dang person should really get a job or something.
Please do not post flamewar comments to HN ;)
well his post was sarcasm.
I'm pretty sure the comment you're replying to is a joke using dang's familiar disciplinary warning format.
exactly
assuming dang is a person and not some advanced AI.
Heh, the fact that (IMO) I don't comment that often but still am in the top 5k (rank 4228, 185 comments) just goes to show how all things considered HN is still a very niche/small community.
It's very difficult in HN to put comment and gain points. Atleast for me. Tried couple of times. Downvoted most of times. So I just visit and read comments. Have been doing same for more than 7 years now. I am sure there are lots of readers like me.
The formula is pretty simple: Write cool comments about things you know about in threads that aren't dead yet.
If you're really trying, you can accumulate over a hundred points in a day without posting any articles.
The site is basically a game if you're optimizing for points, and it's better designed than reddit because you have to actually know things to get them.
Have a niche programming language you like? Talk about it! Have a weird subset of computer science you wrote a thesis on? Write a few paragraphs a day on it! Have domain knowledge for something that isn't computing? "Debunk" all of the articles you see on it. Avoid controversial topics, because these don't grant you as many points. Go solely for uncontroversial deep dives into subjects you know about; it's far better for achieving as many points as you can possibly get as fast as possible.
You also have to have a particular style of writing. Detached, yet (at least on the surface) quite thoughtful. Use commas and semicolons rather than writing choppy sentences, and pay attention to your spelling; presentation is half the battle, and you'll have a hard time getting anywhere if you use less than stellar English. Otherwise identical comments will perform drastically different if there is a single misspelled "at least."
If you master these two steps, you, too, can farm Hacker News for points, get bored and eventually make another account when you want to feel the beautiful feeling of your words having attention focused on them once more, the sweet point-ticker on the top right of the screen offering you slow doses of dopamine throughout your workday that just doesn't hit the same if you're on an account with over ten thousand points.
I don't play this game anymore, as anyone can probably tell from this account and my willingness to break every rule I listed in this comment on it. It's fun to play, though, and I would recommend doing it if you have an aptitude for it; more people talking about more things deeply is always better.
You're totally right, we all see that happening as far as it goes. But how far does it go? I've only ever posted on controversial topics. Usually when I post, I'm prepared to be downranked, and I'm mildly surprised when I get upvotes. I try to stay away from the dang-hammer. And on code or business subjects, I only ever go deep into things I have obsessive opinions about, popular or not. And that seems to rank OK.
I do see bot/troll type attempts on this board all the time, but they usually rack up a lot of points in a short span and can't sustain because they're not real people, or not actually saying something coherent besides "look at me".
The "Show HN" aspect is fantastic. You do see some wild stuff every day. I wouldn't deprive those people of their moment of glory.
But in the long run, I don't know what the point farming points would be, and neither does anyone else. If someone with 40k points disagrees with me, it's not like I think they have a more valid opinion. This, again, is a testament to the style of moderation on this board more than anything else, because it doesn't gamify herd mentality in the way reddit or even SO does.
"The point" is because it's fun to farm points. This is the same reason people play in competitive video games, or even why people posted videos of themselves online before there was a financial incentive to. It's fun to do something inherently collaborative, like being viewed by an audience.
Hacker News fills the same niche for me as competitive video game tournaments do (during a certain time of the year, an easy way to predict whether or not my account will post during any given month is to see how tournaments are going in the game I play most). Hacker News is like a video game you can play at work.
That said, you can also pretty easily monetize farming points. It's pretty obvious when people are doing this, but I also don't see it as mattering too much, so I've never minded it, even though I'd never do so.
Would monetizing points here really be worth it? Even if you had a ton of points and made the front page with your new startup for a whole day. If it wasn't actually an amazing piece of code, or truly original, you would get endless amounts of blowback. Arguably this is the worst possible place to debut anything. You have to be some kind of masochist. And if you spent a dime on farming for it, God Help you. I mean, I love seeing MBA CEOs suddenly jump onto HN to try to do damage control after launching/promoting something here that they thought would get easy hits. That's like my favorite HN sub-genre... the wildly freaked out brand-new CEO. Someone should make a compilation of those.
It absolutely would be, and a lot of people get away with it quite well. It's more subtle than what you're thinking, though, because it doesn't mean just posting ads.
It takes root in posting really good content, at least for a while. You get your points up, get seen as a contributor, and then you start posting your own blog posts. Nothing explicitly an ad at first; you're just trying to get people to start thinking of your blog as something that usually has good reads, and that . Then you eventually post about a thing you made that you think the audience would want to buy, and, not exactly shockingly, they do!
By framing it using something like "My startup failed... again. An analysis," or "Just got the first few bites on my product, after years of trying," you let the audience escape the feeling of being advertised to despite the motive being entirely profit.
There was one user that was so good at this they were on the front page nearly every month of last year and they sold $60k worth in units because of it, never getting called out for what they were doing. To be generous to them, the content was good when it wasn't advertisements. You have to remember that what's popular on Hacker News on any given day will also circulate around a bunch of tech sites that are bad at coming up with their own content.
One person that I actually know built a complete business out of subtly using HN for advertising.
This takes root in even smaller ways, though. Like someone popping up in every thread that's remotely relevant to say, "Hey! We're building a product that does this at lazyfiveletternamedotio! Check it out, it seems like it fits your use-case." Sure, they'll get criticized, sometimes. But they'll also get bites. And when you're selling software as a service substitute for $600/mo, it doesn't take very many bites to make being criticized on Hacker News worth it. Doubly so when you're taking venture and need to up your numbers for the next round.
Gotta say btw, reading back on your HN posts, this one was freakin outstanding http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/pgwrong
>The site is basically a game if you're optimizing for points, and it's better designed than reddit because you have to actually know things to get them.
Haha.
Actually HN seems to be least technical community (when it comes to arguing) out of all those I know (reddit, forums)
Discussions raaarelly *try* to go into the technical details, let alone deeply. I don't think I've seen more than 5 code snippets over year on HN
Not only HN's format doesn't favor this kind of discussions, but also it seems that people prefer more "abstract" more "fancy" topics
I get the feeling that people here do know deep technically and code, but talk about things that don’t frequently use this knowledge.
I think this because every time there’s a coding topic, we’ll get really specific, targeted coding comments that are relevant and make sense.
I meet a lot of ex-programmers now in “higher” positions that don’t allow programming. And many times they’ve expressed that they wish they were programming and look for excuses to allow programming. It’s kind of unique in what’s been shared to me. But I wonder if it’s the same for ex-accountants and others who love a profession but grew out of it for the money.
Those threads earn so few points they're barely worth mentioning. I'm talking about point-earning. Technical threads earn lots of points, and are in the scope of this discussion because of it.
I will point out, though, that throwing code over the wall doesn't necessarily point toward one forum being more technical than another. A discussion on type systems or hygienic macros has far more technical depth than someone responding to a post with a code example of how to do something in React.
Even if they do, the number of people on HN that are able to give well-versed, in-depth comments, that are also accessible to a broader audience on a technical subject (eg BPF and eBPF) is vanishingly small, but also the number of readers for deep topics (deep, not technical vs non-technical eg wittgensteinproject.org) is also small, and are thus not worth farming for karma. For better or worse.
I've been accused of shilling a product I genuinely enjoyed, because of the english I used. :) I think it seemed too exaggerated. But I'm no native, so what do I know. In the end who cares about upvotes.
I shilled my own product once and it didn't get downvoted, but that day people started signing up with thousands of stolen credit cards. Dealing with the fraud that was a result of that post was probably one of the most interesting things in my career though, so I dunno, I guess HN delivered as always.
if you ever post your project on HN ...
[[sucking in air]]
...
just be sure you don't know of any way it can be hacked. It will be hacked, and that's what you'll learn from the experience. But HN is like putting out to sea in a canoe. You can't go back, and it's going to leak, so be more than ready.
What's amazing to me is that you can't pay someone $8 to find weaknesses in your system that let people mine crypto for free, but people are happy to do it and mine $8 in crypto before they get shut down. I don't really understand it.
What surprised me about this incident was how many script kiddies are out there. The sophistication of the attacks were so low. Very poor opsec (using compromised machines as jump boxes, but still logging into the site with their desktop browser with no VPN or Tor), very poor understanding of attack tools (LD_PRELOAD to make certain processes not show up in "ps", except we don't use a dynamically-linked binary to do that, so it has no effect), etc. I feel like I never converse with that type of person on HN, so I just forgot they existed.
I kind of assumed that whole field of specialization died off when people started getting aggressively prosecuted for this sort of thing, but apparently not. If anything, the crypto craze has really increased the demand for hacked Linux systems. I was very surprised to see thousands of compromised machines on major cloud providers attacking us, as well as a long tail of tiny hosting companies that I assumed didn't exist in the world of Linode and Digital Ocean. Like you can get a server in a rack somewhere and sell it to someone, and there are customers that buy that service. Mind blown!
Not to get into the weeds here, but were you actually funneling credit cards through your site to a card gateway like Verisign, as opposed to just hosting a Stripe form or something? I used to write shopping carts. To me it smells like disaster these days if any card transaction is hosted onsite in anyway whatsoever.
We used Stripe. The problem was that our product was initially pre-pay, but we changed it to post-pay at some point. However, that's a different Stripe API (SetupIntents), and so you basically don't see the risk score until invoice charge time (instead of at card entry time). Thus people can use a lot of CPU before you notice that the card is stolen. (Stripe's risk stuff is great. I love how it shows how many other Stripe properties the card or user has been declined on. I wish things like Auth0 gave you this kind of data.)
Honestly the stolen credit cards were interesting, but overall not that big of a deal. We had free trials which were equally effective for crypto mining. Post-pay is always a drag. Lots of people that sign up with cards that have a spending limit well below what we claim the price is going to be. Other people issue chargebacks months later with excuses like "oh, I forgot I was using that" or "I didn't feel like I got the value for what you charged".
All in all it's an amusing business.
> It's very difficult in HN to put comment and gain points
Somehow, I find the opposite to be true. Probably I spend too much time on HN (as evident by the #66 ranking in this list), but most comments are just off-hand thinking/reactions to the submission itself. Some comments do come from being an experienced software developer who never had troubles finding work (which, I guess speaks to something but unclear exactly what, technical capabilities or be-able-to-bullshit? We don't know yet).
The times my posts do gets downvoted, I can mostly understand why, as I made the comment in anger/too emotional place. Maybe your comments are the same? The only time I really get downvoted without really understanding why (exception the emotions of the downvoter) is in various cryptocurrency discussions. HN seems very divided as soon as it comes up.
It really depends on the topic as well. In the vast majority of cases people are reluctant to dish out any karma and your comment stays at one point. But that changes for some topics. I guess if you want to get more upvotes, articles about new Apple releases and similar stuff is most rewarding.
It doesn't decrease your karma to upvote on this site, although that might not be the worst idea.
Come to think of it, I'm not sure why other people are so stingy with upvotes. I vote pretty much everything I like.
The best is to comment early on a front page story, not necessarily a top-level, but if you land within a few folds of the top, more eyes more votes.
> It's very difficult in HN to put comment and gain points
One can have better luck in getting noticed if you are early on the thread.
In a way those members who pickup new threads for discussion are pivotal for a community to thrive.
> Downvoted most of times.
Sometimes this can be a signal about the content of your comment, other times it can be a signal about the content of the thread/topic.
There's a fun HN data mining project waiting to be done on voting/flagging trends, including cross-community topic sentiment surveillance within specific time windows.
I get flagged even more often than I get downvoted. I think it's a personality issue. Theirs, specifically. I usually just go away for a few days and come back when I'm bored / done with the next job.
There is an art to it.
Although if a new account got negative karma early on, I would just abandon it.
Selective evolution towards an account with comments that hit well enough.
No, it's selective evolution towards comment that appease the majority of the commenters, which is different. It's how you end up with reddit-like echo chambers.
A) that’s within the realm of what I wrote, so it doesn’t inherently disagree
B) that also happens, there are also insightful things people hadnt previously thought of that people just like
C) as others wrote, only a subset of users can really affect consensus. So its more of a representative democracy, active users that have accumulated alot of karma are the ones that have to simply be unoffended. But others can flag and effectively censor anyway.
That's not exactly the truth.
The majority of Hacker News users can't downvote, and because of that, you're almost certain to get more upvotes than downvotes, unless your comment has few redeeming qualities.
The majority of Hacker News also doesn't really upvote much. Your typical front page post has under a thousand votes, and posts are the easiest things to upvote. Comments rarely get over a hundred, and almost never get over three hundred.
A single vote can change the outcome of a thread. A reply, even a vicious one, can increase your chances of getting votes; there's a phenomenon in which people will upvote comments they dislike and or disagree with in order to have their response be higher up.
This does mean that HN punishes certain styles of particularly offensive or non-contributing comments, but most won't be punished at all. It's, like vmception pointed out, a system that encourages comments that do "well enough." Because there's no punishment in making a mediocre comment, there's always reason to post. Even people saying absolutely rancid things ideologically aren't likely to get downvoted unless they frame their comment wrong.
HN is about style more than it is substance; it's not an echo chamber, because it doesn't select on ideology. It selects on how pretty your words are.
> it's not an echo chamber
It very much is, to the point that this place is derisively called "the orange website" by those who can see it for that. You might agree with the precepts so it doesn't seem that way to you, but the sooner you can recognize them, the better off you'll be.
I derogatorily call this website "the orange website." That doesn't make it an echo chamber. For as many awful opinions on political topics or type systems there are on this site, there are people who object to them and comment that they do. Hacker News has a tendency to let people say offensive things; this doesn't make it an echo chamber. It doesn't make it good (about 1/5 of the threads are good), but it doesn't make it an echo chamber. Even things that should be pretty much just echoes, like threads about people who killed themselves, often aren't. Because even when someone has killed themselves on this website, people will always come out of the woodwork to say that it was their fault, in contrast to popular opinion. It's not an echo chamber, it's an amplifier.
I agree on all points, except the last one.
If you can downvote, your comment WILL be downvoted based on ideology. No exception. HN is much, much less guilty of this compared to other sides (especially Reddit), but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. If it can happen, then it eventually will, and considering a single downvote buries the comment this a big problem. The real issue resides in using upvotes/downvotes to sort content to give "good" answers more visibility, so unless you only have text at your disposal to express your agreement/disagreement you're ALWAYS bound to have a biased echo chamber.
A single downvote doesn't bury the comment. Multiple downvotes, however, do. A single downvote isn't even guaranteed to change a comment's placement.
I... have two accounts above yours (1k and 3k) wtf it's a small community indeed - I dont even work in a startup, the US, or care about YC lol.
I post too much crap here :s Ill be more careful posting since it's easier to stand out than reddit then !
Neither US, nor startup, nor caring about YC, rank 1174 ;)
#1194 here, same situation. I feel slightly less irrelevant now. ;)
Well - yeah! Jeez. I never thought about relevance. I quit all my social media years ago. Buy I guess technically that puts our opinions in the top 0.01% of the internet; HN usually surfaces things about six hours ahead of the mob ;)
FWIW, everyone I know who worries about their irrelevance to humanity or the zeitgeist is already someone who's contributed way more imagination and creativity than most other people. I feel irrelevant, too; I got to that feeling by proving to myself how little it means to build even the grandest projects, in the medium we work in (code). Recording music again, painting again, just remind me how irrelevant we all are. That's okay. It's in line with realizing you're not the only person with brains on earth; the dude your girlfriend leaves you for might have some brains too, he's not just a cartoon. There's a glimmer of reassurance there when you realize we're all just human. It means you're not expected to be relevant like Julius Caesar, just, it's enough be a good and humble craftsman who's appreciated and compensated for his work.
I’m around the same position as you and was equally surprised - I feel like increasing that count would be more work than I’d want to put in though
Why would you want to increase the count though, right?
I appreciate that HN is a kind of a community where people post when they actually have something to say. I mean, I often write a comment and then delete it before posting it if I figure it doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
I actually feel like doing it for this comment too.
I’m glad you didn’t, completely on topic for this thread. I’m sure you’re speaking for an awful lot of people on HN, possibly a large majority.
If you would like to contribute more, Caslon has a great post here with advice. It’s more than a game though, we all come here not just for the stories, but for the high quality comments. Contributing high quality comments is a real benefit to others, whether your gamifying it or not. Having the discipline not to comment when you don’t have a real contribution to make is also valuable, you’re being a good member of the community. I commented on this post almost an hour after first reading it. I wanted to be sure I had something I thought was worthwhile to say.
Another way you can contribute is through voting, especially if you vote based not on agreement or disagreement, but on insightful or informative contribution to the debate.
Oh I didn’t mean “I want to increase my count but it would be work” I was just thinking that it’s probably one of those systems where doubling what I do now would take 4 times the effort as I’d need to read many more of the articles and other peoples comments so that it would go from casual browsing and commenting to “work” or my wife saying “you have a problem”
You should have done
Same here, top 2.5k after 6 months and ~a couple hundred comments.
Hey, something fun to decorate my resume with:) I at least once said a thing and it wasn't so dumb it go people talking. Hopefully.
It would be interesting to see a network graph of how commenters are connected and grouped.
Here’s to spending more time on things that matter in 2022. Great post.
Spot #595 with 782 comments. Am I.. an addict? :O
#295, 1107 comments... one comment per three GH contribution... hmmmmmmm
My ratio is similar too. Spooky.
I was hoping I wouldn't be on this list. Lots of time spent here. Maybe too much.
HN is such a good community though... No other place like this exists on the internet.
I'm number 536, suprising I made it that high :)
Reading over the top few names, even though HN doesn't emphasize usernames at all, I recognized quite a few of them. Quite fascinating and a compliment to their comment quality.
366 min read !
Not a good advert for HN that I'm in the top 30% !