What I enjoy about HN is that for most part we ignore <i>who</i> is saying something and instead focus on the content. This is in contrast to a site like Twitter, where the number of followers and blue checks make a massive difference to the number of people who will see your thoughts. This ends up creating a system that <i>feels</i> fairer. I don’t need to waste time cultivating an audience and farming clout, for instance. I can simply lurk and comment on the rare threads where I know what I’m talking about. I don’t care about my karma, and no one else cares about my karma either.<p>The exception to this is links to personal blogs, where links to domains of well known people immediately rise to the top. This is a simple question of time - it takes time to evaluate full articles and people are more likely to invest that time if the name seems familiar.
I just find that it's more a reflection on how soon you post on a topic, rather than how much insight you provide. A fantastically insightful comment #100, is not going to get a fraction of the upvotes of a mediocre comment #10 on a post. That's because of the nonlinear exposure. If you post early, you will get more reads which leads to more upvotes which will puts your comment near the top. Almost all my comments with more than say 20 upvotes, are "early" rather than "great".<p>What I'd like to see are <i>average</i> upvotes of <i>buried</i> comments. Comments that were highly rated based on their content rather than their exposure.
A gem from this article: "Minecraft would probably never have happened, if Notch started by asking in the forums if he should use Java or not."<p>Most things wouldn't happen if the creator asked ahead of time what they should do. This is the dark side of peer review and relying on peers. It leads to a kind of mental / creative vetocracy situation where ideas are killed in their most fragile state by casual comments.
I really like this. One peculiarity about HN culture I found is that commenters will often comment something tangental to the subject of the post, so I often find myself reading really insightful comments on threads I otherwise have zero interest in. This is cool because it surfaces all those cool sometimes totally tangental comments.
Five plus years ago I wrote a chrome extension that was like an RSS feed for people on HN (still works).<p>Basically, you followed users and it would create a "news feed" which would show posts from users and comments (with links to context). It would also highlight interesting comments from those users on pages I visit. Similarly, I could block users. Let's me follow people I find interesting. Looks very similar and with some tweaks could be public.
Very interesting, but giving them the title ‘leaders’ seems a bit.. overbearing?<p>Do not get me wrong, there is some very interesting stuff there but half of gathering chunks of upvotes is not rocking the boat and saying anything that goes against the echo chamber.
I'm conflicted about this, in theory good comments and insight can come from anyone. In practice, reading some comments on at best waste your time, and at worse make you dumber.<p>Information is like food for your brain. But with information, you can't tell what's nourishing, what's junk food, or what will make you sick until after you've consumed it.
I wish "average karma" was still a metric on this site.<p>I think it helped provide a gauge to help people decide between leaving valuable comments vs. just leaving as many comments as possible.
I think this is neat, but i don't honestly care what the comments of these random (to me) people are, nearly as much as I care what posts they're commenting on.
"leaders"? More like the inner sanctum of the echo chamber.<p>EDIT: If you look at historical influential figures most of them were controversial.<p>That's not surprising... "leading" society means leading it to a new place, not keeping everything as it is.
When I see highly upvoted users, I tend to recognize a lot of them as people posting wild and unfounded speculation, drama, conspiracy theories, etc. I'm not terribly interested in those views.
The top voted comment on a post is considered the "best" opinion or thought that the thousands of viewers & commenters had in response to the subject matter.<p>Sometimes it is a bit disappointing that some bland platitude or parroted opinion of the week is rated as the most insightful thought our collective brains could muster.