[brudgers]

I suspect statistically, the HN for X is HN.

A topic silo encourages people to behave in ways that might help them reach the top of the silo. Getting to the top is expedited by pushing other people down. Even worse, it is expedited by driving out expertise.

The dynamics of HN prevent that. Topics so broad that being way outside your domain is the normal state of encountering an HN topic for everyone. Nobody has a well informed opinion about most of the items on the front page...most people don't even care about more than a handful of them even when there is a single story dominating it.

Secondly, there is no way to get to the top of HN. While karma adds up, HN is a constellation not a heap. The center is YC itself with rings of founders in the closest orbit around its mass.

Karma itself only puts you in the Oort cloud.

[egypturnash]

I am trying to imagine the reaction an artist or musician would get to "Show HN: here is some art I do" and it is at least 50% "what is this doing here, HN is for programmer/startup stuff". I am pretty sure the HN for X, where X is "art" or "music", is not HN.

I am also finding myself tempted to do exactly this with regards to the graphic novel I drew a few years back, just to see how badly it performs.

[dang]

We just got an email from a painter the other day and I encouraged him to post his stuff here. We'll see if he does. Admittedly he only knows about HN because he's also a programmer.

[egypturnash]

huh, maybe I should post my GN here sometime then. Probably on a weekend, I feel like non-programming stuff generally gets more traction here on the weekends.

[brudgers]

It is somewhat more better than internet points when one of my posts gets a “why is this on HN?”

I don’t think HN will ever be overrun by original artworks. Partly because like most things on the internet most original artwork trends a bit forced. Mainly because nothing dominates HN. Not even Lisp.

[cheschire]

Art and music topics do appear on HN front page, but only when they satisfy intellectual curiosity.

Sharing art or music itself rarely does this, but I remember recently seeing an acid house generator, and another had a constellation of electronic music samples along a long page.

[acheron]

My highest voted story submission by far was when the Netherlands Bach Society started the All of Bach project many years back. It's somewhat random what will catch HN's attention.

[dioltas]

I remember the acid house generator, but I missed that constellation of samples sounds really interesting. Would love to see it if you had a link.

[cheschire]

Found it, and after a few months since it was posted, I was misremembering the scope of the list; it’s significantly more than just electronic music.

https://everynoise.com/

[tomduncalf]

Might be referring to Ishkur’s Guide To Electronic Music? https://music.ishkur.com/

[thx]

really wish there was a “Literature Extension,” actually specifically for HN

love this website & audience but am doing work in the “building copyleft storytelling” space - a community of which does not yet seem to exist

but wait a sec - what “building copyleft storytelling” even mean except for sounding like some make believe fantasy thing?

by vision rn it’s something like coding but with respect to allowing a new community of creators to grow / develop via effectively “using” (fan-fiction-ing”) a copyleft creators work for new & original creation of

- story

- character

- plot

available for anyone to create w & sell commercial on the basis that they likewise license their work as copyleft Creative Commons CC BY-SA & link-to/credit original source work

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

i.e

this week am actually releasing signature characters from 3 vol of my free 2 read copyright short story series as copyleft / Creative Commons (CCBYSA) “copyleft character personas” anyone can create w/ (w license & link to credit source)

- NFT art (imagine a cryptopunk with a backstory)

- new orginal story ft copyleft character

- develop copyleft world build

will this be a use-case for crypto ecosystem? i.e ETH for Art/Character/Copyleft world-building?

if no, then what about when considering the “attention-economy”?

if curious about, short story series can be found here - https://blondyn.com

& almost daily superstrings here: http://superstrings.substack.com

for the record, if one vote can count, i do not mean this reply to come off as a shameless “post-selfie” but a legitimate “idea-pitch” from a HN regular of about 5 yrs who is “a writer” that is having difficulty finding an audience which == real bad kinda (sweat-drop + smile emoji goes here;)

also real bad is having zero folk / friends to talk about such an idea with

if this post still makes peeps mad just know just saw this link & the Cheshire post reply on “Art & Music” & imagined “Storytelling” could maybe fit in there as a neat 3rd thus thought to make like Wonderland /share something that ought at a minimum count as curious while simultaneously in quest to be mindful

also if such a copyleft storytelling community does exist pls share thx

[avaer]

What's the best way to contact you?

We could have an interesting conversation since we've been working on very similar things.

edit: email and socials are in my profile

[thx]

Updated profile also / look forward to connecting

[jancsika]

> I suspect statistically, the HN for X is HN.

I don't find that to be true for certain topics:

* unions and unionization (apparently 9 out of 10 HN uncles agree unions are bad news for a mountain of uncles' evidence)

* current state of research in the social sciences (you have to wade through inescapable trolls who wish to throw out entire fields of research because they once read an eviscerating blog by an angry grad student regarding p-hacking)

* geopolitical significance of Wikileaks since its inception (did you know humans can lie by omission? You did? Anyway, let HN concern troll you about it in the form of copy-pasta bots once roughly every full moon.)

* cost benefit analyses of Electron (HN almost seems to have made a sport out of overestimating the cost of memory and hard disk space in the year 2021)

* veracity of traditional news media (like playing duck-duck-goose except the goose is some poster quoting the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" cocktail story in an attempt to do an end run around reading any of the books written by experts on that topic)

* how to absolutely position HTML text over the exact same position as SVG text. (That was my own Stackoverflow holy grail quest, but I'd be willing to bet no one will reply on this thread with the right answer.)

I'd love to know what other topics people find here that are typically filled with garbage.

[dang]

There are plenty of pro-union posts here. Of course it's a divisive topic, but it's a cognitive bias to see the other side as "9 out of 10" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Most generalizations people make about HN are subject to this sort of distortion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

When put in "unions" into HN Search and look at the recent comments (excluding things like SQL and credit unions), opinion seems split, with a mild tilt in the pro-union direction. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=true&que...

[BrandoElFollito]

Re: social sciences. It is not always trolling. As a physicist, when I look at the abysmally low quality of data analysis and bias in presenting the results I have zero confidence in what is claimed.

If there was actual willingness for these journals to publish rigorous papers where bad statistics are rejected, maybe people would have more trust (and not have fun of the "science" often found in the papers)

[yesenadam]

> what other topics people find here that are typically filled with garbage

Well, for me, the subjects I know the most about, like (some aspects of) music, philosophy, chess. Full of people who know nothing about the subject misinforming others.

[Abishek_Muthian]

I built a topic silo modeled after HN and I've been running it for 2 years so I think I can address some of your statements.

It's a problem validation platform[1] called needgap. Problems are the first class citizens submitted as posts. Startup ideas, MVP, Products to solve the problems goes into comments.

I modeled it after HN for the reasons mentioned by OP and I wanted it to minimal design wise for reasons made clear below. I built it on top of Kenny Grant's golangnews.com project.

It's usually the Entrepreneurs who create posts for validating a problem/need-gap. They and other entrepreneurs comment about solutions or their own product. Consumers who are searching for a solution for their problem visit the respective needgap thread, Check out the products and sometimes make a comment.

Insights like number of people visiting a problem, top 3 countries (week/month) and how many will pay for that startup idea in the comment are available to subscribers($5 USD).

> to the top is expedited by pushing other people down

> it is expedited by driving out expertise

Voting is just for platform sanctity at needgap and doesn't add much value to the validation(Views from search, Comments are more important). Further, voting rights(karma) can be gained only by commenting and Downvotes burn a karma. Votes are shown only to the owner.

> Nobody has a well informed opinion about most of the items on the front page

That's why needgap doesn't rely upon regular user's subject matter expertise but that occasional (often one-time) visitor's expertise about knowing about a problem (or) knowing how to solve that problem.

Validation happens through those who might actually need our product and not by a bunch of people in a closed platform like most 'pay for a startup idea' type platforms. Hence minimalism of HN matters, email is optional like HN. Someone who comes to needgap from Google Search doesn't even need to know what needgap is.

> there is no way to get to the top of HN

Lifetime of posts (problems) is very long at needgap, 2 year old problem still get solutions as the need for solution exists as long as need-gap exists.

But since number of problems/day is low when compared to HN almost all genuine problems(i.e. problem != startup idea) gets its way to home page and many stay there for several months.

There are about 3500 registered users, almost as many visit needgap every single day organically.

[1] https://needgap.com