alt Hacker NewsThis post makes me feel really old.
HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.
Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as opposed to communicating to promote or to manipulate or to drive traffic or to pull any number of other “levers”) is exceedingly a thing of the past.
Replies
> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.
A simple way to refute this is to note that some links were posted multiple times and only got traction on the second or third time.
Couldn't agree with you more. The internet has, to borrow the word of the moment, become enshittified, and people think that's "normal".
People accept that platforms should be centralised, and that they should harvest your data in order to sell it to adtech companies who will then feed it to an industry that learns in real-time how to prey on your darkest fears to sell you things you don't need but might make you feel slightly less sad for a second. And people just accept it: that's normal these days.
They even call it doom-scrolling, and don't ask "wait, should I want to scroll through actual doom? Is the occasional video that makes me smile really worth it all?"
Perhaps it's my age, but I can't understand anybody who says their main form of media consumption is YouTube. How? How do you actually put up with that, knowing what is behind every mouse movement and click, and the knowledge that every single pixel in front of you is being tweaked by robotic neuroscientists squeezing every drop out of A/B tests to make you feel like utter crap? Like, seriously, WTAF?
HN is popular within its niche precisely because it isn't like that. It is not "a platform", in the modern and now normalised sense. It links out to other sites and asks people to come back together to discuss what they saw there. Old school. No ad tracking. No doom scrolling. Pick what you like. Click it, don't click it. Discuss it, don't discuss it. Nobody is tracking "engagement". There's some gamification, but does anyone _really_ care?
This type of interaction is entirely native to my generation and older (I just squeak into millennial, on the older side), but feels completely bonkers to people who think Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are what is normal and how the Internet works.
Some of know they're not normal. We know they're aberrations, ghouls that prey on unwitting masses.
> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.
That's an oversimplification. There are things that get responses because they're flamebait rather than interesting, and then even more interesting things that never get any discussion going.
I don't know if the residual factor is just "chance" or if there are controllable inputs involved.
(One thing I do suspect but cannot confirm is that article title has a large effect. Interesting stuff with bad title gets overlooked, and vice versa.)