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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Whoa - people submit thirty thousand stories. I mean I can imagine drunk commenting a badly thought out phrase a few thousand times (that's basically my metier) but ... reading an article, being amazed, and submitting it ... that's a lot

Edit: Just to point out this is not necessarily a criticism or some snide remark. I am pretty sure that back in the day I would have looked at similar Wikipedia stats and gone "whoa there are people who basically have a full time job trying to organise an online encyclopaedia." Then I would have assumed I could code it in a weekend. The point I think is not "these must be low effort submissions" but "HN has a more diverse ecosystem than a rando like me posting every so often"

In short - who knows what the forums of the future will look like or be? HN does not look like the forums from ages back - it maybe something new.

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> reading an article, being amazed, and submitting it ... that's a lot

I'm pretty sure they skip steps 1 and 2!

Must be some sort of bot or marketing service. If you look at their posting history, they submit the same article over and over again. This should be filtered or flagged.

People could at least recognize people who are farming karma and stop upvoting them.

> In short - who knows what the forums of the future will look like or be? HN does not look like the forums from ages back - it maybe something new.

HN is the closest to the forums of yesteryear of anything I can find on today's internet, and that's definitely what I like best about it. (Not just the visual aesthetic, but also the tone and dedication to maintaining its original sense of community.)

I may not be a good representative sample, but the forums I remember were fairly niche (transatlantic life advice) and consequently small. 4chan style meltdowns were avoided but HN is on a different scale. It might be an aberration, it might be a new way to moderate / build community. I am not sure but it is a very interesting question how we got here. And is it replicable?

And if there are people who do the equivalent of full time work making it so - that's a clue to ... something

> And if there are people who do the equivalent of full time work making it so - that's a clue to ... something

dang, who seems never to sleep, surely puts in even more than full time work, and is responsible as much as anyone else for HN being what it is.

Absolutely. But it is his actual full time job. I think an interesting signal is when people who (#) are not paid still spend an enormous amount of time on a "thing". That's either you have found weirdos, or found some level of market fit - gold flakes in the river bed if you like.

(#) I am assuming all the people with really high submission rates are not HN moderators or otherwise employed / encouraged.

I'm almost sure those are points and not submissions, as the numbers are the same as in 'Users who got the most voted on hackernews'.

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