Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting.

I posted an article a couple of weeks ago. The point of the article was that get-rich-quick-by-blogging stories are a dime a dozen, when the formula is really very simple: write for yourself, make friends, and keep doing it.

Because it was so simple, I thought it was cute to do a 1 or 2 paragraph format. Here it is

http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/how-to-make-a...

Of course, it only got one vote. (Thanks mom!) But the weird thing was that somebody from HN came by my site and took the time to add a snide comment along the lines of "Why did you post this on HN?"

To which I (logically enough) replied: then don't vote it up.

Seems to me we are getting a fair share of drive-by trolls, downvoters, and flaggers. Ten guys hate you that are on HN all the time? They can zap your article no matter what it is.

Why folks from here would visit blog submission sites and berate the blog authors is beyond me.

That's not reddit, but that's definitely a change in the atmosphere.

I have seen comments in HN similar to what you have experienced, comments from frequent posters as well.

The unpleasant thing is that people expect to be hand-fed their daily dose of intellectual stimulant, and got upset if the dosage is off. I've seen comments like, "Your submission/post/blog are lame. It's very annoying it wastes my time." WTF?! The guy spent lots of time writing a blog and asked for feedback. If it's not up to your level, just move on, no point in bashing the guy on wasting your time just because you don't find it stimulating.

What is more disheartening is the upvotes for those kinds of comments. It's really a turn-off.

This is interesting. I wonder if this is an effect of HN elitism. As in "I read HN which makes me cooler than sliced bread." Disturbing nonetheless.

The bury brigades had to go somewhere when digg own-goaled.

If there really is 'vendetta downvoting' going on, perhaps it could be negated by limiting the number of times a user can downvote another specific user's comments/submissions within a certain time frame. Eg. you can't downvote the same person more than twice a day, and if it's a submission you can't downvote two in a row

I hope I didn't come off as making sweeping generalizations. I think 99.9% of the folks on here are awesome. If anything, I think this is just a problem of growth, as I said on another thread today:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800252

This is probably the most unusual part - taking the time to leave that kind of comment outside of the HN submission itself.

It's one thing to interrogate if a link is valid on here (eg, by downvoting or through the comments), but taking the time to interact with the site itself and backreference HN is pointless, and damaging to the reputation of HN (regardless of if they are an accurate representation of the community or not).

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