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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. Hav

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.

arkj 5y ago
> 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.
raxxorrax 5y ago
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.
- verdverm 5y ago
  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.
- noduerme 5y ago
  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.
pferdone 5y ago
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.
- jrockway 5y ago
  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.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    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.
    - jrockway 5y ago
      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!
      - 5y ago
vmception 5y ago
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.
- birracerveza 5y ago
  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.
  - caslon 5y ago
    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.
    - birracerveza 5y ago
      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.
caslon 5y ago
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.
- noduerme 5y ago
  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.
walterbell 5y ago
> 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.
- noduerme 5y ago
  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.
capableweb 5y ago
> 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.

arkj 5y ago

> 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.

raxxorrax 5y ago

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.

verdverm 5y ago
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.
noduerme 5y ago
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.

pferdone 5y ago

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.

jrockway 5y ago
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.
- noduerme 5y ago
  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.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    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!
    - 5y ago

vmception 5y ago

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.

birracerveza 5y ago
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.
- caslon 5y ago
  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.
  - birracerveza 5y ago
    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.

caslon 5y ago

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.

noduerme 5y ago
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.

walterbell 5y ago

> 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.

noduerme 5y ago
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.

capableweb 5y ago

> 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.