Confessions of a Reddit Karma Whore
vice.com
vice.com
"I shut myself up in my room. The further I removed myself from the people I knew in the real world, the further I descended into the minds of people I’ve never interacted with and would never meet again."
It seems the author isn't even aware of how awful this is, since later he admits he's still a karma whore. I am thankful that I recognized what an abysmal facsimile of an actual life this sort of thing is when it was only Usenet. I had a similar addiction for a little less than a year in the mid-90s. It seriously damaged my marriage, and more than I realized at the time, in hindsight.
Real relationships with actual, real people that you can see and touch and talk to are essential for a healthy life. If this statement causes a negative reaction, please ask yourself why. It needs your immediate attention.
I recognize that not everyone has family that lives nearby, and some have lost their natural families, which is very difficult. And there many who are estranged from their families for various reasons. I was estranged from my family, but that improved greatly with some considerable (and still ongoing) effort on my part, even though some of them have diagnosed mental illnesses.
I guess my point is that if you have family members, it is well worth it to try to salvage what you can. If you do not have any family, it is well worth it to try to make one. Yes, those family members could be found on Reddit. Better to make the effort to have "real-life" friends and family you can see and talk to and touch daily so you don't have to be miserable alone. It can be hard to see when you're in the midst of it, though.
You'd be out there trying to find real friends at meetups, clubs, gatherings, etc. don't ya? It helps a lot if you assume that internet doesn't exist for a day and see what miracles your mind comes up with then!
But it's not like it would make more sense if the term was longer. The whole reason the Internet was created was to be the network that could survive a nuclear war. It'll always be there. People communicated via the Internet way before reddit and others, and would continue doing so if they were to disappear.
"Imagine living without the Internet" is a useless imagination. It's a thing of the past with no way of reappearing. If your ISP were to go down, I assume you'd just switch to mobile data. Assuming you're using two different companies, it would take quite a catastrophe for both of them to be down at the same time, at which point your survival instinct would kick in, not a desire to make meaningful relationships offline.
I for one am not miserable when I'm alone. I love my alone time. And to be clear this is not because it is rare. I make a conscious choice to be alone a lot of the time.
I sometimes love time with people too, but only in small doses and only a very few people (this does not mean I can't enjoy being out in public - being around people I'm not interacting with constantly is just fine).
I certainly don't want to have people around to see and talk and touch daily. The very thought is an exhausting nightmare to me.
People manage to do that just fine all the time. All that's required is to write with the presumption that people might have different experiences. It's fine to suggest that some people are not living healthy lives if they don't have more social contact, and that it's a good idea to ask yourself why you might have a negative reaction to someone suggesting you have more, because everyone ought to understand their own needs and sometimes we don't.
What came across as insulting was that it is worded in a way that suggests this applies to everyone, and that people with different experiences just don't know how bad we have it. That generalization was unnecessary and took away from the overall point.
> when there are a e.g. million+ people in japan who don't leave their bedrooms and never grow up or grow out then there is obviously a new unsustainable pattern of anti-social behaviour
And the way to address that is to with the simple qualification of addressing specifically those who are unhappy with their situation, instead of suggesting that everyone who chooses to have most of their social contact online must necessarily be miserable.
I have no problems believing that lots of people are terribly lonely. At the same time I know that ironically a lot of people put a lot of energy into telling people who are not lonely to be more social. If only they'd spend that energy on people who want more contact (here's a simple one I wish more people would try: give eye contact to people you meet, and ask "how are you?" and actually wait for an answer when e.g. interacting with people in service jobs - you'll be astonished how quickly people will pour out built up emotions on near total strangers the moment someone shows the smallest sign of caring even if that sign is something as basic as actually waiting for an answer instead of just treating questions like that as meaningless greetings) instead of continuing to try to get people like me who are perfectly happy to be more social.
You can't build a healthy social diet on just approval. Some people do that with real life. It just happens to be far easier to do on the internet because we figured out that approval is addictive and drives user engagement.
For example, I see this every time a discussion about code review culture comes up. The thread is always popular, and it always gets exactly two opinions: "we should be nicer" and "grow a thicker skin." God forbid there could be a situational truth to either point! You'd think from the discussion that every developer is either a caustic veteran or a thin skinned newbie who needs to get over themselves.
For one, the current top comment in the thread to which you link is careful not to take the word “insane” at face value, in keeping with the spirit of the featured (OP) article.
> The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. [0]
The OP also observes
> Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people seem to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I intended that as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply that any of them literally have diagnosable mental illnesses. I have a lot of respect for all of the individuals I listed and they seem like nice people, I was just trying to make a point about how unusual their behavior is. [1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18884146
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
Speaking of which, could someone with enough internet points on Math SE ask this guy https://math.stackexchange.com/a/35238 how does he deal with carries during multiplication? I made an account specifically to ask this, but I'm not a mathematician and don't have enough expertise to answer questions asked there (or perhaps I'm too lazy to hunt for questions that I could answer).
When I moved on to better work I was able to leave it behind. HN is my only “social media“ now and I try to keep even it to a minimum.
Almost anyone with history of using the Internet in a psedonymous capacity can attest to this fact - remote relationships one builds can be very strong and fruitful, surpassing even one's most intimate "IRL" connections, and real life relationships can be weak, obscured, superficial, and lonely. In my experience most people operate thinking that online relationships (and even all interactions) can only be adversarial and abstracted from the real people behind them (e.g. a battle of ideas) but I think there's a lot to be found in positive human interactions online.
Taking this further, I think the idea you espouse has the potential to be dangerous and alienating - it denies certain modes of interaction that some people are not only comfortable with but satisfied with. In denying this capability, you not only shut yourself off from this potential, but you alienate people who find it most fruitful to explore this potential.
This opposition comes up a lot - many people simply cannot understand how one can build a meaningful mostly-anonymous relationship online, or they cannot understand how one can build a sex life in the comfort of their room. They view it as a kind of degraded way of having a relationship or sexuality, "not the real thing", a mere substitute, that the person must be sad or lonely to be finding such enjoyment, to be deprived in order to seek it out, and unsatisfied to pursue it.
It calls back the idea that the masturbator (or the contented asexual) can't be satisfied, since she's not experiencing the joy of sex - she's living in a sad, lonely, isolated and lower-tier way. It calls back the idea of the anime/comic book/sci-fi fan who can't be satisfied with their pleasures (or worse, that they are stuck in a childish imaginative state) because "it's not real/they're just comics/they're pixels on a screen". It calls back the idea of those who enjoy atonal music being either posers or fundamentally broken because they enjoy it more than classical period (or pop) music. It calls back the idea of asking why people would want to listen to music sung in languages they don't understand. It even calls back the idea that philosophy and abstract math are useless because they don't solve any real world problems. In its most egregious form, it calls back the idea that one can't enjoy a good story in a book because it's not visual/auditory and therefore can't appeal to us in the same way a movie can. Why read the Harry Potter books when you can just watch the films, right?
With all due respect, I cannot express how much I detest this concept. It only comes from narrow-mindedness and pre-established ideas. The concept figures that because I can't see the value, the value can't exist for anyone else. Nobody else could experience the world differently. Ironically, it displays a lack of empathy - something, as conventional wisdom would have it, can only come about through real life interactions.
To be clear, I'm not saying you adhere to the general 'conception' I've criticised here, but I am saying that your point fits very nicely into this ultimately harmful conception. I realize the irony of having this kind of argument online.
You set up a false comparison, by the way. There are both meaningful and not meaningful offline relationships, as there are both meaningful and not meaningful online ones. Most offine relationships are not meaningful. It's not useful to compare offline acquaintances with close online friends, just as it's not useful to compare offline friends to online pseudoanonymous interactions.
I grew up on web forums and had/have friends who are just online friends, so I'm no stranger to the phenomenon. But you can't get a hug online.
I'm not implying that a hug is essential, but it represents a class of interactions mostly around intimacy (both platonic and non-platonic) that the digital medium has a lot of trouble substituting. I'm not a touchy feely person, and I'm more fine with traveling alone than pretty much all of my friends, but I still carefully maintain local meatspace friends because I find those interactions essential to my long term happiness regardless of having online friends.
In other words, I disagree with you because I think the medium really does matter, orthogonally to the question of the quality of the relationship.
I think you can be perfectly content without making new friends online, if that's what you mean. But the line is blurry. Do you consider keeping in touch with friends who you used to hang out with but don't live in the same place any more as "online friendships"?
It was that it was a slow creep that lead him down the path and sometimes you don’t realize where you’re headed until you have a come-to moment where you take stock of your life.
It took me years to realise that what made me unhappy was trying to maintain these 'real' relationships out of a similar belief that it was what I needed.
It's not that I can't enjoy relationships with people face to face. I do sometimes. But it takes a lot out of me. It drains me of energy. [sometimes that's worth it; sometimes it's not; sometimes it'd be worth it but I just don't have the energy.]
The relationships you don't consider real often makes me happier. They're as meaningful to me as face to face relationships, but a lot less exhausting.
The right balance for me is to be close in 'real' life with a partner and my son, and rely on my colleagues and the occasional other person for some limited other face to face contact (and a day or so a week is enough, thank you), and otherwise stick to myself in 'real' life and keep interactions largely online.
Even then I often I prefer total solitude, and I'm happier this way than I ever was spending time with people for the sake of trying to be someone I'm not.
Chasing 'Real relationships with actual, real people that you can see and touch and talk to' can be as soul sucking and damaging as locking yourself in if you're doing it just because you're made to think that's what you should be doing.
Not everyone is like you.
I have ADD and interacting with people is draining... I have to focus on the conversation and most people don't understand that sometimes they say something that gets my imagination going, which makes me lose my focus so I miss some parts of what they say. Until I notice it and zoom in on the conversation again. Which in turn makes me sometimes miss some crucial points. Even when they know I have ADD it still might upset them, even though I do my best. And that is just one example of what makes it hard for me to interact face to face. I prefer writing.
At my worst I even forget what I wanted to say mid sentence! Or I have to blurt it out and interrupt people...
We, are introverts.
Introverts can function in the real world, but only for short bursts at a time. We can make friends, go to parties, even be the life and soul of a party - but only for short bursts at a time, then you'll usually find us chilling out somewhere quiet, recharging our metaphorical batteries.
A lot of people confuse introversy with being shy or timid or other negative connotations, and they'd be incorrect.
There are many good articles on what being an introvert is and means. For example https://introvertspring.com/what-is-an-introvert/
People are quite able to differentiate if they’re fearful if they’re under people or just exhausted.
I’ve no clue what you’re talking.
> Besides, the article doesn't describe any particular "illness".
Calling it illness might not have been the right term, but at least it’s some kind of personal development which has gone a bit into the wrong direction. And if that’s the reason why an introvert person isn’t going more out, isn’t going to meet more people, then there’s something wrong with the introvert person and perhaps this should then be changed with additional personal development, perhaps some kind of therapy.
If that’s not what you meant, then fine, otherwise that’s the reason why I’m a bit upset, because it puts introvert people into a light of wrongness, that something has to be changed in them.
You might be, but that's not the reason why real relationships "drain [you] of energy".
> The relationships you don't consider real often makes me happier. They're as meaningful to me as face to face relationships, but a lot less exhausting.
That's more than just being introverted.
That's not a value judgement, btw.
That’s certainly not the case for myself. If I’m exhausted I need to be completely alone to recharge. Yes, being with close friends is a lot less taxing, but it still is not the same as recharging,
I think you're making assumptions based on yourself and extrapolating. I don't really spend time around "very close friends". My closest friends are people I haven't seen for years, and I'm fine with that. It's not that I wouldn't enjoy spending time with them, because I do, and there are people I spend time thinking about regularly, but I just don't feel a need to go out of my way to see them - when it happens, it happens. And I'll need time to recharge afterwards, but that's ok.
> If you have balance in your life good but be careful of loneliness, we are social beings, even introverts.
While this is pretty much a truism, I think it exaggerates through omission. Yes, we should be wary of being lonely, and yes, we're all social beings, but that does not mean we have need for the same volume of social contact. I haven't felt lonely for decades, even when alone for extended periods of time. I don't see why I would - I don't know what it is like for someone to feel that kind of need for social contact. Again, it doesn't mean I don't like social contact now and again, but it takes very little of it to keep me happy and content.
Or is that in fact what you are saying? I suppose there are alternative explanations I haven't thought of either.
I'm saying it really doesn't matter to me if a relationship is "real" or online most of the time. All else being equal, it doesn't make much difference. But all else is rarely equal. I can't choose to have an online-only relationship with my son. And I do enjoy time face-to-face too, it just isn't sufficiently important enough to me that I tend to seek it out for my own sake very often. Sometimes - variety is good - but not often.
Before my son came about, I didn't feel a lack of anything when I was single and childless. I remember a year I spent my summer vacation holed up in my flat coding only going out to go to the shop where my interactions with staff was pretty much single words. That was the entirety of my "real" social contact for three weeks.
I remember that vacation fondly.
I also remember vacations that brought more social contact fondly.
The point being I can be happy with people in real life, but I can also be just as happy keeping things entirely online. I don't need that real-life interaction. Sometimes that real-life interaction is nice or even great, but that is different (online interactions can be equally great). And since those real-life interactions tends to be more draining, I prioritize them only with a very few people.
> Otherwise, the implication is that you would prefer online relationships over that with your partner and son, and you see your partner and son as simply obligations to which you do not wish to abdicate responsibility, presumably due to societal norms or something else.
You're conflating my general needs with what it takes to maintain specific relationships.
That I don't need to see people in real life to be happy, doesn't mean I don't realize that others do, and since I can be happy seeing people as much as I can be happy just talking to them online, I certainly will make time for people in real life when they are sufficiently important to me and I know it makes them happy. That's not out of obligation, but because I care about them, and I accept that not everyone can make do with as little social contact.
But it is still draining, and I still need time to recharge. Even with my son. It's worth it because it matters to him and I love him and want him to happy, just as you'll do all kinds of other things that you yourself don't need if it matters to those you love.
At the same time there are people I also care about that I have never seen face to face, or haven't seen in many years, but where I don't feel that face time with me is necessary for their happiness (the wording is deliberate - I'm not saying they wouldn't be happy to see me), and so it's not a priority for me to ensure we meet face to face unless they make it clear it matters to them even though I do care how they're doing.
This is the vast majority of the comments on 'hacker' 'news', including your own here.
> Not everyone is like you.
Non everyone is like you either. That's the problem with a social media site like this one where anectdata is king.
I did not question that things aren't that way for the person I responded to, which necessarily suggests I accept entirely that not everyone is like me.
I also explicitly said as much in my comment in the very first line by explicitly stating that I don't suggest their statements may be right for some people.
If anything, I expect from experience that I'm in a relatively small minority.
I'm actually astounded by how many people replying seem to reject this idea entirely. I fear they may have eschewed real world relationships for so long that they haven't really got any, don't remember the difference, and use online "relationships" to fill the void as best they can.
Sure, you can have relationships online. But it's never the same as real world relationships. Not even close. The satisfaction I get from being with my wife, my family, and my friends, is so, so, so much greater than any interaction I've had online with a person I've never met. Not remotely comparable.
That the article is talking about a "karma whore" is telling. That title would imply that the main benefit of the online "community" is getting points, not having relationships. It's just a silly Internet game with short, rapid dopamine feedback loops. Social media, with its likes and upvotes, hardly seems like actual social activity.
There's a long history of people choosing to live solitary lives, and as far as I can tell there's no good reason to assume that they made the wrong choice. Sure, most people might need real social contact, but humans are a varied bunch. Let's accept or maybe even celebrate this, even while still keeping in mind that the more 'deviant' a behavior is, the higher the chance is that it's unhealthy.
I'd never recommend a random person shut themselves in and replace real human contact with a digital version, because on average, it's probably not a good thing. But I try my best to also not impose what is 'normal' on them, because for all I know they're one of the odd ones out.
(I am one of those odd ones, to an extent, and trying to conform to the 'healthy mean' has had some bad consequences.)
I don’t believe it can be argued in good faith that touch and sight are valued due to completely arbitrary reasons.
It makes me feel like early experiments with multi-variate moderation deserve a second look. I know that simpler systems generally increase engagement, that's probably why everyone (even Netflix) converged to a simple up / down model. But there might be simple ways to split out the types of feedback we're always worried about conflating. You could add little emoji or stickers below each post that are default grayed out, as an option instead of replying.
One of them could be a "this makes me angry because I disagree"-sad-thunderstorm sticker. Another could be spam. That approach would funnel downvotes into separately bins for spam, low effort, and controversial. That sorting could nudge the crowd into providing much more useful feedback. People wouldn't have to ask why they were downvoted.
Gaming would probably happen, but it'd be more diffuse. If there are multiple positive bins, not everyone is going to be gaming in the same way, they won't be comparable.
Allowing this to be customizable on each subreddit could allow for some really crazy experiments. The unpopular opinion reddit could create a user interface that actually encourages the sort of voting they want, as opposed to constantly complaining that people are voting incorrectly.
Just as an example I just upvoted you and I would like to see your future comments, I care less about how many people are upvoting a content and care more about who upvoted it, and whether that person is selective to upvote constructive content only.
The main problem I see with echo-chambers today is the culture war type of thing. I think there could be interesting solutions to that: based on the karma "distance", build clusters and adapt network topology so that you can only discover clusters that are at a finite distance. Minimize risks of conflict while letting people explore "fringe" ideas (for them).
,,Hubski is temporarily not accepting new users.
Check back soon.''
The trollbots and spammers beat us all there.
For example, with Reddit/HN comments, you could have:
"This commenter was polite." [strongly disagree | disagree | neutral | agree | strongly agree]
"This comment backed up its assertions with sources." [...]
"This comment was funny." [...]
etc. etc.
Reddit is a nice confluence of several things that humans find addicting - semi-random rewards, detailed metrics, quick feedback, novel stimuli, all magnifying the power of underlying signal (social approval). None of that is specific to reddit, of course–every social website eventually becomes that same game, or dies.
Unlike the OP, though, I didn't find it unhealthy. Compared to, say, video games, or TV, chasing karma was a much better hamster wheel to run on; it motivated the sort of careful analysis, planning, and diligence that I could eventually apply to real problems. My hope is that reddit (and reddit-like attention machines) push more strongly in this direction; the ideal feedback loop isn't one that spurs no addiction at all, but rather one for which addiction has net positive consequences.
Reddit is pretty much the definition of echo chamber on majority of subs. Tho i understand why from psychological point of view.
Not everything on reddit is culture war, though. there are plenty of peaceful subs out there where there's no narrative to echo.
Ok, well played.
Just because there's no points, doesn't mean people don't get satisfaction from people replying to them, or having your thread stay at the top with lots of discussion.
Replying to threads bumps them to the top right? So having a thread high on the page is a similar signal as point rankings right?
From a meta perspective, I guess trolling-for-the-sake-of-trolling can be part of the 'echo chamber.' However, at a surface level it remains antipodal to the idea of 'following a narrative.'
In my experience this varies wildly, both from board-to-board and between imageboard sites in general.
One aspect is moderation.
The MO of 4chan moderation is to enforce US Law and a bare minimum of conduct in such a manner that it is not noticeable to most posters. If you use a browser extension which allows you to monitor deleted posts/threads, such as 4chanX, and have it monitor a thread where a poster is intentionally trying to incite controversy in a manner which is not conducive to the topic or board theme, they will generally get silently deleted. On their end, they may get warned, banned, or no notification at all, but the deletion is primarily effective because it deprives them of their exposure (also, ban evasion is trivial, while keeping one's flamebait up is not).
Another aspect is the culture of each board, which varies wildly on 4chan. For example, posting political and social flamebait on one of the slower, niche boards will just as likely result in people silently reporting the bait and not replying, or only reply to call out the post as flamebait (which is less ideal, but generally ends the conversation chain). If the content is deleted in a consistent and timely manner, the posters can establish norms, and can more effectively handle borderline flamebait without devolving into a flamewar.
Meanwhile, on faster boards, the larger number of trolls and people willing to take the bait, along with the ephemerality from faster pace of thread birth and death, results both in moderation being unable to keep up, and a need for more moderation, usually in the form of "janitors" (board specific moderators with limited powers). The more janitors, the more erratic the enforcement of rules tends to be, especially for Global Rules 3 and 6. So there tends to be greater animosity between moderation and posters on faster boards. The extreme examples would be /b/, /r9k/, and /pol/, the latter two informally serving as an outlet for (a)social and political posts which have proven to be irresistible to discuss while simultaneously being rancorous enough to derail almost any thread.
So to sum it up, trolling is more effective on the fastest and most vitriolic boards, and less effective on the rest. IMHO, the best "proper" ways to increase your exposure is to either post original content (with mixed success on a good day), actively engage others in conversation that is at least tangentially related, and if on a more image-oriented board, provide on-topic content to bump the thread.
What is fascinating that there are exactly zero advantage of having large karma racked up on reddit (or HN). Most likely this would in fact work against you. However, still, brain is wired up the maximize any social recognition it sees regardless of its usefulness or "realness". This is in same class as a drug addition where brain can't prevent itself from doing things even when it understands its not good for the being.
Also worth taking a look at is u/Shitty_Watercolour: https://www.reddit.com/user/Shitty_Watercolour
HN gets pretty boring for me after 15 minutes. reddit just keeps it interesting all day long. From my early days on BBSes to Usenet to IRC to Slashdot to digg, etc I’ve never witnessed anything as addictive as reddit.
I stopped using it completely five years ago.
It might just be my cynicism but not believing most of the self posted stories that populate the front page, or, while I love dogs in real life, not caring for another dog photo, or, a post trying to pull at your heart strings. I don’t get the modern appeal of reddit. It’s of course a hugely popular site.
The comments for big stories are usually filled with tepid jokes or repeating some part of the post or some meme. Or there’s a good chance a reddit post is just plain wrong or the comments are by and large uninformed.
Most of my friends also by and large aren’t into reddit. But I recognize it’s a top 5 most popular site and so likely is addicting to a ton of people.
On the other hand, while I waste too much time on H, I’ve never made any social connection here. This is the only social site where I spend substantial time and have no social connections at the end of it.
Basically I've maxed out the filter on /r/all (yes, it's actually called /r/all and there was a time when it wasn't...) And then I visit just the communities that I'm interested in. I am subscribed to some of them, but I don't use the home page at all.
Perhaps I need help? :)
step 1: follow news source that targeted subs hold in high regard
step 2: post an article with a title that's going to cause lots of comments, grammatical/spelling errors always get the ball eolling
step 3: wait for the karma to roll in
Then I started questioning people and I came to a stark realization. 80% of the people in several technology threads were kids under 18 years old--typically 15--and had no work experience in the field!
But this is my point. Karma on reddit means less than nothing to anybody outside of reddit postings and, even then, it doesn't mean anything to 80% of all those people cause they won't look at or notice your karma anyway. So what's the point? What is the value in that?
Despite my troll reputation, and you may know me, I still have nearly 10K in karma value. What does that tell you?
When I'm in my social and family circles, I almost never hear anything about reddit and, when I do, it's always a joke about an insane posting where everyone laughs at how stupid it is.
I'll never forget the comment of a reporter on NPR one day who stated, "Reddit is a Frankenstein's monster even they can't control".
Karma/Likes are like tiny happy pills. Psychologists will be studying this for decades to come.
I'd have thought that such behavior would be punished. As I understand it, HN goes further, looking for voting cabals and sock-puppet groups.
See the whole Unidan saga a few years back for how the mighty can fall once they get busted using sockpuppets
''The act of seeking karma is a sensitive issue on the site. Some users post original content, or stuff that they only make themselves. These users, Redditors will tell you, are respectable because their pursuit of karma is funded by their own work and energy. But the site’s system is volatile, and not all original content is well-received. Karma whores know this in their core. Karma whores learn to be clinical and bot-like. Karma whores make nothing themselves and often pull their content from users on other sites without crediting. This recklessness, Redditors will tell you, reveals the true emptiness dwelling inside these people.''
You see much of the same behaviour here. I've noticed this manner of website tends to avoid discussing the issues with upvotes and downvotes; they're only good in theory and are constantly abused in practice; discussions of gaming the system are also typically taboo. It's clear to any idiot that if you want Internet points on Hacker News, you simply spend time uploading the work of others and collecting the value ascribed to that which you had nothing to do with.
The only reason I made this account was to promote my work to a wider audience, only to find that no one on ''Hacker'' ''News'' was interested in the least. None of my work has received even a single comment. That's another issue with voting systems; people are led to believe a vote may as well be a comment, so they don't write one. Anyway, the utter disgust and disappointment I've experienced and also seen secondhand for some others I hold in good regard towards this place has led me to implement my own comment system, so as to be free from trying to appeal to this place.
I'd delete this account, being sick of this nonsense already, but it's my understanding the posts would remain indefinitely, so I'll keep this account to make posts such as this, giving my opinion on these things I find wrong here.
I don’t think HN is a bastion of meritocracy or being amazing either FYI.
I'm certainly not pleased about it.
>I don’t think HN is a bastion of meritocracy or being amazing either FYI.
Part of the issue is with the name, perhaps. This website portrays itself as a hacker venue, but my Lisp and machine code articles receive nothing, whereas people wrapping HTML and JavaScript around programs others wrote, reimplementing something worse in Rust, or even commenting on something that happened on Reddit receives hundreds of comments and Internet points. I couldn't care less about the points, but surely you understand it would be frustrating for a place that claims to be about hackers to do this. Perhaps I wouldn't feel this way if it had remained Startup News.
Of particular note and relevant to this main topic, I wasn't the first to submit my articles to Hacker News. Someone else was in an IRC channel with me discussing one of my projects and, in pursuit of Internet points, uploaded it without even asking me. To see my work put on Hacker News so someone could get points is one thing and then for it to be entirely ignored is an additional insult. Surely you understand some of how I feel, with this.
It actually would be weird for YCombinator’s only news aggregator site to be only about hard programming “hacking”. It’s an established huge incubator of startups. So naturally the news aggregator site itself will be broader than just hard programming “hacking” as YC has matured.
Also I assumed hacking has multiple meanings. Hacking together code is a common enough phrase. So that would include doing web dev stuff. The front page doesn’t usually consist of just html wrappers.
I think you are blaming something that isn’t a problem. The problem seems to be this site isn’t what you want. And the site never pretended to be what you wanted either.
And the whole point of news aggregators is for anyone to be able to post something. You’re again upset at the whole point of this site. There was no illusion or trickery. This is how modern Web 2.0 news aggregators work. You’re also assuming the person did it for internet points. And upset at that. Which makes it seem like you want to do it for internet points.
Hacker News by any other name would be just as sweet, and that's not very sweet, but the name still matters and influences perception.
>It actually would be weird for YCombinator’s only news aggregator site to be only about hard programming “hacking”. It’s an established huge incubator of startups. So naturally the news aggregator site itself will be broader than just hard programming “hacking” as YC has matured.
Again, the name Startup News was more appropriate. Now, in my eyes, the only purpose of websites with this design, including Hacker News and Lobsters and Reddit, is self-promotion and related activities. This design of discussing almost entirely things that are happening elsewhere is only amicable to these activities, I think.
>I think you are blaming something that isn’t a problem. The problem seems to be this site isn’t what you want. And the site never pretended to be what you wanted either.
Well, when you wanted to announce something thirty years ago, you could use Usenet. I've looked for other venues, and found some, but that doesn't change that Hacker News still, somehow, amasses a decent amount technically-inclined people. I did give Lobsters a try, to less disappointment, but unfortunately that created a slippery slope that has me having an account here; Hacker News makes Lobsters look good in much the same way Reddit makes Hacker News look good. The only reason I upload any of my articles here is because that one fellow did and the utter lack of interest displeased me.
>And the whole point of news aggregators is for anyone to be able to post something. You’re again upset at the whole point of this site. There was no illusion or trickery. This is how modern Web 2.0 news aggregators work. You’re also assuming the person did it for internet points. And upset at that. Which makes it seem like you want to do it for internet points.
Again, I don't care at all about these meaningless points. The only reason I bother having any here is because the design of this website forces one to collect them, lest posts be hidden, among other things. Now, I have nice discussions and pleasant interactions about my work elsewhere, under better systems, but there's little cost to me of uploading my work to Hacker News, at this point, and so I may as well continue doing so.
> Ultimately, in the pursuit of simplicity, a flag octet would be avoided, as all my thinking would leave half of it unused and that I find poor, and so the final format is as follows: sixteen octets indicate the IPv4 or IPv6 address, with all zeroes indicating a system action; three octets represent the time, likely with fifteen bits representing the year as an integer and nine bits representing the day within that year; an octet has its top two bits determine if the request successfully completed and if the selector ended properly, with the latter six being used for a length of the only variable-length component, the selector itself.
Holy run-on sentence, Batman. You have two problems, the presentation of the topics aren't all that engaging, and your writing style could use some improvement. As a writer myself, I have to wonder how many revisions that went through. I need at least three drafts with days between them before I publish anything substantial.
Examples of real life applications might make it more interesting as well -- a lot of the drama of HN stories are where the design didn't quite work in the implementation.
I'm supposing you'd suggest I use a list format where each item is on its own line, then? I may make that change.
>You have two problems, the presentation of the topics aren't all that engaging, and your writing style could use some improvement. As a writer myself, I have to wonder how many revisions that went through.
Some of my work goes through several revisions since publishing and some hasn't gone under any yet.
>Examples of real life applications might make it more interesting as well -- a lot of the drama of HN stories are where the design didn't quite work in the implementation.
This wasn't my most exciting article, by any means. I have a Common Lisp library I've written that's rather well-documented. I suppose I could submit that next, as something more interesting.
I appreciate the critique.
That's a long sentence, but not a run-on.
And then one fine day I realized that all the effort was pretty points. Just like Reddit karma, Blind points had no value. Deleted the app, deleted accounts on all social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc) and life has been pretty much good since then.
I don't think the reddit organization is responsible for this I do think the guy needs help.
I think this is the WWI of our generation to realize how much computer technology can be a bad thing. We've had dark patterns influence behavior and the health of people. We've had strategies that are designed to hook unsuspecting people and we're seeing some serious repercussions out of it.
Not sure what to suggest to do here. But I do find it concerning.
That's a weird analogy, could you explain that further? I don't really follow how living months in cold wet trenches, watching your friends get killed everyday and killing enemy soldiers relates to social media addiction?
Previously, survivors of wars were fairly small populations. Our great- and great-great-grandfathers were in that war. Not a few, but a major fraction. Not just in one country, but in many.
The world had never seen that sort of trauma before. It shook our cultures to their foundations, as male role models either disappeared altogether or came back with PTSD and no support structures.
It's all very different, of course. But I grok the analogy.