“a dribbling selfish jerk” – an analysis of getting on the front page of HN

There is a large percentage of users on HN who are neither tactful nor socially competent.<p>I've been here for 6+ years and while much of the time the discussions can be insightful, many other times you get people who are overly aggressive and downright mean because they're either unable to control their jealousy or throw away all decency for the pursuit of Truth and Accuracy.<p>I really don't know if it's because of something like Aspergers, or that maybe hackers tend to be overly analytical and take pride in that over being civil. I find myself complaining about it from time to time.<p>This is the norm here.<p>Edit: OP, "A Dribbling, Selfish Jerk" should be the title of your blog from now on.

I'm just amazed someone is a sad enough individual to take time out of their day to write a nasty email to someone they don't know. Don't sane people just close the browser window and move on?

I actually think you got unlucky with this one. I've been fortunate enough to get a few posts onto Hacker News over the years and I've never received any remarks like the one you had.<p>Once bitten, twice shy (though also it appears twice on the front of HN so not all bad ;) however my experience is that most of the discussion and feedback from Hacker News is very good and that which is rude or genuinely unfair gets downvoted pretty aggressively. That doesn't of course account for private messages but for one reason or another I don't tend to receive those.

It's better for the future of this site and "community" if it didn't become people's goal to get on the front-page, or some such idiotic achievement.

Were I to have written this, I would have included a link to the post in question. That seems a pretty obvious traffic acquisition strategy to me. When you write a followup about how <i>this</i> post was included on the front page perhaps that will be a point under "The Bad" :-P<p>The few times I've been on the front page of HN I've had a fairly consistent 1000 visitors per hour, FWIW.

I was on the front page the day I released my "blog" website. I ended up being on the front page for a few hours, but that is partly because I released on a Saturday evening. The traffic was shocking.<p>I didn't end up with any really bad feedback. In fact, I was immensely pleased with the feedback I received and the commentary I had here on HN. I think it was obvious to those who visited that the site was brand-new and rusty. I considered adding a comment area to the site, but I decided against that for several reasons I don't want to get into here.<p>I also thought I missed out on the social media stuff, but I don't think I did. The traffic was very healthy from social media because people <i>wanted</i> to share my article, and I don't think that any real reminder would have caused people to share that would not have. I did add social sharing buttons on the site for about a week and the sharing decreased during that time. Also, there was a lot of traffic from "other" social media outlets, so how many buttons would I really need?<p>Congrats on front-paging again. It really is a nice feeling.

I'm surprised that he got fewer than 1000 hits. I always thought that HackerNews and Slashdot (probably much larger, I guess) would send way more people, for some reason.<p>I guess HN traffic is quite targeted and valuable to some people though.

I've been on the front page a few times and got around 10,000 to 20,000 visits from it. It often brought many more comments on the posts that made it than when people find it another way, but I saw no real increase in social sharing. Opposite that, if a post makes it to a fairly popular subreddit, I get a lot less comments from that kind of traffic, but on the other hand the posts will tend to be picked up again by other blogs or sites. I found that interesting.

If you make a comment that's downvoted, it gradually becomes invisible to the extent that people have to select it to view it.<p>I know from experience that either people do just that and then downvote or else downvote unread. Either way it smacks of kicking a dog when it's down.<p>It seems anomalous that when a comment is upvoted no one knows it except the person voting and the person getting the vote but when you're downvoted everyone knows it.

We were on the front page briefly the other day (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4916201" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4916201</a>) and got about 2,800 visitors. The comments were largely helpful and the experience a positive one overall.<p>On the other hand, nobody succeeded in earning the $2,500 bounty yet.

PG's hierarchy of disagreement should be a sticky post on the front page for this reason. +1. Thanks for sharing.

I'm guessing that someone posting like that on HN would quickly be downvoted and then shaddow-banned.<p>Comment systems are baffling, and it's an important problem that needs some work.<p>Don't say what it is, but did they use a real name or an obvious psydonym or pseudoanonymous?

My unseemly ranting about a popular hosting service was pinned to the top of HN for about a day. It was good for about 20,000 visits.<p>If you think 20,000 visits in 24 hours is a lot, it's not. It just isn't. It hasn't been since 1998.<p>But the audience is valuable.

Now that you have all your analytical installed, I'm interested in seeing what they produce :-)

Congrats you're on the front page of HN now! Nice insights on the post though.

Heh, now you've gotten on the front page twice. Yay?

I've honestly struggled with how to give feedback to other users on HN. It's not hard to be civil, but my automatic reaction is to look for things to <i>criticize</i>, not because I'm overly critical, but because I assume that's the purpose of submitting your work to HN in the first place...if you're confident enough to do so, I guess I just assume you have a decent amount of self-validation going and more patting-on-the-back is going to be less helpful than critique.<p>*<p>Having read your original post on HN, I noticed you didn't actually fix the problem that the rude user complains about. The rude user is definitely out of line, but are you really much better by just dismissing their point as simply "sheer mind-numbing stupidity"? Is the user wrong because he/she was an asshole or just wrong period? Because I think the user had a good point: you refer to an off-site video that you don't show until the very end, and you don't even link to the indepth NYT article that includes the video, which would be common courtesy for any SEO specialist.