TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Ask HN: What's a Useful Comment?

1 pointsby hajderrover 4 years ago
When is a comment not worth posting anymore here at HN? I.e. with the risk of it going unseen.

1 comment

jfengelover 4 years ago
What&#x27;s so bad about a comment going unseen?<p>The fact is that most comments go unseen. It&#x27;s a big world, and it&#x27;s very rare that any of us has a truly unique fact or viewpoint to share. Sometimes people will see your comment and vote or engage in conversation, which is great, but it&#x27;s very hard to tell which comments will attract attention and which won&#x27;t.<p>And that&#x27;s OK. It cost you nothing to make the post, and it probably didn&#x27;t even cost much of your time. From that standpoint, it&#x27;s pretty much always &quot;worth it&quot;.<p>It does cost a certain amount of additional clutter in the universe: your comment is probably redundant with others, and it&#x27;s probably not the best written of those. But your comment probably won&#x27;t be the one that pushes a thread over into unreadability.<p>If you comment a few times a day, write politely and clearly, and are actually writing with the intent of communicating rather than simply talking to hear yourself talk, then pretty much anything is &quot;worth it&quot;.<p>But if your metric of merit means that people see it (and indicate that they&#x27;ve seen it by voting or commenting)... it&#x27;s pretty much never worth it.