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Thesis HN: People are now targeting blog posts at Hacker News
28 points by awt on Aug 26, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 27 comments
Over the past few months, a shift in the popular content showing up on Hacker News has occurred. More and more stories are blog posts catering specifically to hacker news readers. True or False? If this is true, I'm not sure what the implications are except a possible decrease in the quality of the content that gets to the top due to it being upvoted for superficial characteristics that are known to please HN users rather than real insight/value provided by the content.


Why overthink this? Writing blog posts to HN, instead of trying to express tangential thoughts through link submission ("This new Apple app rejection shows their policies are the worst ever!") is something the site guidelines specifically ask you to do.

What I'm noticing is not that the submissions are becoming bait-ier, but that everything is immediately getting enough votes to get onto the RSS feed, no matter how flagrantly it violates the site guidelines. Whatever force is automatically providing 2-3 ambient votes to every crap posting here is the thing I'd actually be concerned about.


As I think more about it (sorry :D), it seems like the more blog posts targeted for HN that reach the top, the more "closed" the site becomes to ideas and insights outside of the current set of memes circulating through HN. In otherwords, the insight level gets stuck at a local maximum. On the other hand, I don't think anything can be done about this.


I don't think that's true. I've written quite a few postings that were interesting to the HN audience and not so much to others that normally read my blog, but I actually get more and better feedback from the HN crowd anyway.

There are lots of links posted every day still and I think we're nowhere near becoming a navel gazing self centered community. When you suggest that I'm thinking of K5, HN is very far away from that.


I think the reasoning behind upvoting for each reader is much more complicated than that.


That seems to be curbed a bit lately, there is now a 4 vote minimum to get to the homepage, and a short delay before links are taken in to account for the homepage as well. This has removed a lot of crappy postings from the homepage feed.


"everything is immediately getting enough votes to get onto the RSS feed"

Not true for my submissions, unfortunately :-(


I've always written my blog posts targeted to HN. Taking a few minutes to think about whether or not your audience will find something insightful or informative before writing and posting it seems like it would generally improve the quality of the front page.


This seems a bit odd to me. Standard advice on writing is to have a particular audience in mind when you write. The Hacker News audience is characterised by greater than usual interest in startups, business hacks and programming, but not everyone in that demographic is on Hacker News.

Are you drawing a distinction between targeting the HN demographic and targeting HN itself? The former seems to me an entirely normal way to write a blog post.


This isn't really about blogging, it's more about the content submitted to Hacker News. Before Hacker News was big, people didn't write blog posts targeted at Hacker News, so there weren't many blog posts targeted at Hacker News ON Hacker News. Now that Hacker News is big, ratio of blog posts targeted at hacker news to all other links is increasing. So I, as a Hacker News reader am experiencing something of an echo chamber effect.


I used to write longish 'self posts' but people were complaining about reading 'gray on gray' so I moved them to my blog with the comments turned off.

So that's one example of posts specifically targeted to the HN audience.

The echo chamber is in the end only as large as the world is, the bigger HN gets the smaller such an effect would be, even if people targeted HN specifically in their writings. But the vast majority of the postings are not like that, and those that are are - at least to me - quite often either useful or interesting.


Isn't that encouraged? From the guidelines:

Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I think posts written for HN are not generally a bad thing - I've written several blogs either with HN in mind or directly for consumption here - that is actually encouraged by the guidelines.

But you're right - people ''tailoring'' articles for HN could be a problem. I realised a while ago that the right title can get you on the main page, but I can't bring myself to play the system :) It's only a blog, not really worth it.


This is true and mostly because a news in HN triggers an idea in the reader and instead of writing a comment which will be missed by masses they write a blog post and submit to HN, I think it's good but I wish there was a way to link these discussion so new comers to that topic knew what the hell the blog post was talking about.


I like to keep an eye on things like this and, yes, what I'm seeing leads me to believe you're right. But it's a part of a larger trend of people "targeting" and reworking content to do better on social sites generally - just getting the "right" title can make all the difference, especially on HN where titles rule.


Content targeted to HN can lead to well catered content and in-depth discussions with multiple posts on similar topics.

I think as long as the community doesn't just vote up articles because they pander, content targeted towards HN is a great thing.


Your consensus seems reasonable to me. It would be interesting to see how many links submitted are by the author. Not that there is anything wrong with that, just saying I would be curious to see.


That's already available, it's just not particularly convenient. For example, http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=retroafroman shows that you've submitted two stories ;)


True. But I can't always tell by someone's HN username if they are the author of a blog post that they have submitted.


Especially not when their profile is blank and their nickname does not hold a direct link to the site posted. But usually when you check their submissions like suggested above if they are mostly submitting from one site that's a pretty good indicator they're at least affiliated somehow.


I'm glad you did this post on HN; a blog post wouldve been pretty ironic.


I haven't yet written some of the posts I've been thinking about, but I will absolutely be targeting them at HN. The discussion here is much better than other places and I can rely on a general "base knowledge" of the audience. If people don't like it they don't have to vote it up, but I don't see a problem with keeping the audience in mind. I don't even have blog comments because I'd rather have the comments on HN.


I agree with you. I think HN focused blog post decrease the HN quality in general. There should be something like "Ask HN" but in this case for the blogs, something like "blog to HN", to warn the readers what kind of information they are reading.


Yeah something like "HN Blog: Erlang and the Use of Monads in Haskell", or at least "Author Post: ...".


Isn't one of the major parts of writing considering who the audience is?


I think it's fine...as long as the person doesn't do the whole "I've read so and so story on HN...but instead of replying in comments, here is my reply as a blog post"


"Every public place is a market"


I do not have a problem with that. I prefer it that way. Content written by us, for us.




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