In blogs people can come along anytime and use comments to add additional information/context/perspectives, point out misunderstandings or outdated information, share updates, pose questions and start interesting conversations that do not have an expiration date on them.
The discussion for the article can be found on the same webpage by readers, they don't have to go looking on external sites, most of which have terrible searchability and now require logins just to view content and can delete threads and valuable discussions arbitrarily.
I just realised while writing this comment how much I miss web comment culture from the 00s.
That said, I run old fashioned forums and some older threads get revived there from time to time with new insights. Others get flagged up by copyright holders under DMCA takedown threats or bumped by spambots though.
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
This is more or less artifact of HN algorithm, it's common to get single digit votes for majority of your posts. Whether something blows up feel almost random, you have to get pretty lucky to hit a time window when there's not that many posts or a lot of people look at new page and upvote the post at the same time to make it snowball. Many links are posted multiple times with no traction and then they suddenly blow up on 4th attempt.
HN doesn't have an algorithm, per se.
There are voting mechanics, and some sites gain or lose a penalty based on content or type (most generic news sites, for example, are slightly penalised). There are keyword / topic penalties too for issues that are dominating the hivemind for a period.
But mostly what you're seeing is simple mass-media power-law effects, along with early-action advantage:
- Votes / article tend to follow a power-law curve, where the frequency of high votes is inversely related to the vote. This typically shows as a linear relation when the log of both values is taken (log(frequency) vs. log(votes)). There are 30 front-page slots on HN, about 11,000 opportunities per year (at day's end, more if you count intra-day appearances), vs. about 400,000 submissions (see: <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>). Most submissions won't make the grade, often through no fault of their own. I've looked into this in some detail, including looking at votes/comments by story position (there's a sharp decrease here as well).
- A small amount of early activity (upvotes, flags, comments) tends to have an outsized effect on the trajectory of a given story. Low-quality comments are particularly deleterious, and are hunted aggressively by mods for this reason.
- Stories often do far better on a subsequent submission. Part of this is probably randomness, part also a familiarity effect among those reviewing the "New" queue. If at first you don't succeed ... try again, a few times, at least.
- Stories can get selected (or nominated for) the Second Chance or Invited pools. These increase odds of landing higher on the front page, and are used fairly frequently. See "pool" <https://news.ycombinator.com/pool> and "invited" <https://news.ycombinator.com/invited> under "lists".
TBH, I have considered writing a version (this isn't my work at all, yet) that does submit the blathering server-side so it looks like there is a useful round trip, but:
* I have more important projects awaiting the much fabled arrival of Free Time!
* While it could potentially keep an idiot “happy” longer, I'd have to mess around with some sort of login system to give the right people the right comments back, it couldn't rely on a just session ID as that would be as volatile as the comments in local storage.
* Taking in the data gives the possibility of DoS by extra routes.
* Giving back the data gives the possibility of the comments being abused as a Heath-Robinson-esk storage device!
Remember Shoutboxes? :)
For example on retro computing boards it makes me so happy when someone bumps a 5 year old thread to share new details, benchmarks, etc. about some card or motherboard where the ancient thread is first thing that appears in search results.
> A small amount of early activity (upvotes, flags, comments) tends to have an outsized effect
This is exactly the problem.
> what you're seeing is simple mass-media power-law effects
I would challenge that point. Power law comes from some feedback loop, which is partially from network effects but it can be massively amplified by the system, which is exactly what HN does. Not only it bakes the power law directly into the score eqaution, but it also shows the list sorted by score by default, which creates a positive feedback loop on votes.
Actually I'm a bit perplexed that it works this well, HN algorithm was one of the first that I implemented on our site and it was quite terrible even after a lot of tuning. I feel like it must be tuned for some volume of posts and people, otherwise it doesn't make much sense to me.
<https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-myth-of-the-algorithm...>
To the extent that HN does utilise specific procedural mechanisms to adjust the priority of content, it's virtually always away from the typical patterns of algorithmic amplification: less emotion, less outrage, fewer hot takes, less nationalism and relgious flamewars, and specifically toward "intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation": <>>13108404 >.
It would be possible, yes, though incredibly disingenuous, to argue that what HN is doing is itself amplification. Yes, any curation is an amplification of some content over other, but in a world where "algorithmic content" means clickbait, brain-crack, and stickyness, HN is quite clearly aiming for something else.
Another facile objection is that HN fails to achieve its stated goals. Well, yes, it does, and the mods freely admit this (see, e.g.: <>>20188101 >). Why does HN fall short? Because the problem is hard (see, e.g., <>>16163743 >).
If power-law dynamics were purely the result of manipulative algorithmic amplification, we'd see them only in online media subject to such amplification. And that's simply not the case. Power laws are fundamental to not only all of human communications and interactions (word and letter frequencies, for example, neither of which suggest a strong influence by algorithmic amplification), but to all manner of natural phenomena, including those entirely outside the realm of biological activity (e.g., frequency/magnitude plots of earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroid impacts, and stellar novae).
And in the realm of interpersonal online communications, HN's goals and interventions (mods, voting, and some programmed mechanisms) are desperately trying to swim upstream. As someone whose online tenure pre-dates the Web and extends to pre-Eternal September Usenet, HN has done remarkably well, and outlived many of its antecedents' and competitors' useful or entire lives (Usenet, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Google+, et cetera). Trust me, I'd love to see it do better (a view often voiced by mods as well). But in an ordinal ranking with what actually exists it's an exemplar.
This isn't a nitpick, it's a core and central point with (literally) universal applicability.
HN of course have all of these problems, just look at what we're doing now. It's in some ways better and some ways worse than others.
It's trendy these days to blame the algorithm or social media companies, but these problems are way more fundamental. Thinking that this platform and even you yourself is somehow immune to this is delusional.
> an end-goal of increasing time-on-site, engagement, addiction, outrage, and similar measures
Yea, again, this is naive oversimplification that's just been popular recently, but those are not endgoals and often go against platform goals. Outraged users don't click ads and increase revenue, they cause problems, drive other people away from the platform, same is true for the other issues.
As somebody who's been working on a social media platform for 7 years, I just can't hear this stuff anymore. Those problems exist, they are hard and much deeper and more difficult to solve than most people think.