[caslon]

The formula is pretty simple: Write cool comments about things you know about in threads that aren't dead yet.

If you're really trying, you can accumulate over a hundred points in a day without posting any articles.

The site is basically a game if you're optimizing for points, and it's better designed than reddit because you have to actually know things to get them.

Have a niche programming language you like? Talk about it! Have a weird subset of computer science you wrote a thesis on? Write a few paragraphs a day on it! Have domain knowledge for something that isn't computing? "Debunk" all of the articles you see on it. Avoid controversial topics, because these don't grant you as many points. Go solely for uncontroversial deep dives into subjects you know about; it's far better for achieving as many points as you can possibly get as fast as possible.

You also have to have a particular style of writing. Detached, yet (at least on the surface) quite thoughtful. Use commas and semicolons rather than writing choppy sentences, and pay attention to your spelling; presentation is half the battle, and you'll have a hard time getting anywhere if you use less than stellar English. Otherwise identical comments will perform drastically different if there is a single misspelled "at least."

If you master these two steps, you, too, can farm Hacker News for points, get bored and eventually make another account when you want to feel the beautiful feeling of your words having attention focused on them once more, the sweet point-ticker on the top right of the screen offering you slow doses of dopamine throughout your workday that just doesn't hit the same if you're on an account with over ten thousand points.

I don't play this game anymore, as anyone can probably tell from this account and my willingness to break every rule I listed in this comment on it. It's fun to play, though, and I would recommend doing it if you have an aptitude for it; more people talking about more things deeply is always better.

[noduerme]

You're totally right, we all see that happening as far as it goes. But how far does it go? I've only ever posted on controversial topics. Usually when I post, I'm prepared to be downranked, and I'm mildly surprised when I get upvotes. I try to stay away from the dang-hammer. And on code or business subjects, I only ever go deep into things I have obsessive opinions about, popular or not. And that seems to rank OK.

I do see bot/troll type attempts on this board all the time, but they usually rack up a lot of points in a short span and can't sustain because they're not real people, or not actually saying something coherent besides "look at me".

The "Show HN" aspect is fantastic. You do see some wild stuff every day. I wouldn't deprive those people of their moment of glory.

But in the long run, I don't know what the point farming points would be, and neither does anyone else. If someone with 40k points disagrees with me, it's not like I think they have a more valid opinion. This, again, is a testament to the style of moderation on this board more than anything else, because it doesn't gamify herd mentality in the way reddit or even SO does.

[caslon]

"The point" is because it's fun to farm points. This is the same reason people play in competitive video games, or even why people posted videos of themselves online before there was a financial incentive to. It's fun to do something inherently collaborative, like being viewed by an audience.

Hacker News fills the same niche for me as competitive video game tournaments do (during a certain time of the year, an easy way to predict whether or not my account will post during any given month is to see how tournaments are going in the game I play most). Hacker News is like a video game you can play at work.

That said, you can also pretty easily monetize farming points. It's pretty obvious when people are doing this, but I also don't see it as mattering too much, so I've never minded it, even though I'd never do so.

[noduerme]

Would monetizing points here really be worth it? Even if you had a ton of points and made the front page with your new startup for a whole day. If it wasn't actually an amazing piece of code, or truly original, you would get endless amounts of blowback. Arguably this is the worst possible place to debut anything. You have to be some kind of masochist. And if you spent a dime on farming for it, God Help you. I mean, I love seeing MBA CEOs suddenly jump onto HN to try to do damage control after launching/promoting something here that they thought would get easy hits. That's like my favorite HN sub-genre... the wildly freaked out brand-new CEO. Someone should make a compilation of those.

[caslon]

It absolutely would be, and a lot of people get away with it quite well. It's more subtle than what you're thinking, though, because it doesn't mean just posting ads.

It takes root in posting really good content, at least for a while. You get your points up, get seen as a contributor, and then you start posting your own blog posts. Nothing explicitly an ad at first; you're just trying to get people to start thinking of your blog as something that usually has good reads, and that . Then you eventually post about a thing you made that you think the audience would want to buy, and, not exactly shockingly, they do!

By framing it using something like "My startup failed... again. An analysis," or "Just got the first few bites on my product, after years of trying," you let the audience escape the feeling of being advertised to despite the motive being entirely profit.

There was one user that was so good at this they were on the front page nearly every month of last year and they sold $60k worth in units because of it, never getting called out for what they were doing. To be generous to them, the content was good when it wasn't advertisements. You have to remember that what's popular on Hacker News on any given day will also circulate around a bunch of tech sites that are bad at coming up with their own content.

One person that I actually know built a complete business out of subtly using HN for advertising.

This takes root in even smaller ways, though. Like someone popping up in every thread that's remotely relevant to say, "Hey! We're building a product that does this at lazyfiveletternamedotio! Check it out, it seems like it fits your use-case." Sure, they'll get criticized, sometimes. But they'll also get bites. And when you're selling software as a service substitute for $600/mo, it doesn't take very many bites to make being criticized on Hacker News worth it. Doubly so when you're taking venture and need to up your numbers for the next round.

[noduerme]

Gotta say btw, reading back on your HN posts, this one was freakin outstanding http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/pgwrong

[tester34]

>The site is basically a game if you're optimizing for points, and it's better designed than reddit because you have to actually know things to get them.

Haha.

Actually HN seems to be least technical community (when it comes to arguing) out of all those I know (reddit, forums)

Discussions raaarelly *try* to go into the technical details, let alone deeply. I don't think I've seen more than 5 code snippets over year on HN

Not only HN's format doesn't favor this kind of discussions, but also it seems that people prefer more "abstract" more "fancy" topics

[prepend]

I get the feeling that people here do know deep technically and code, but talk about things that don’t frequently use this knowledge.

I think this because every time there’s a coding topic, we’ll get really specific, targeted coding comments that are relevant and make sense.

I meet a lot of ex-programmers now in “higher” positions that don’t allow programming. And many times they’ve expressed that they wish they were programming and look for excuses to allow programming. It’s kind of unique in what’s been shared to me. But I wonder if it’s the same for ex-accountants and others who love a profession but grew out of it for the money.

[caslon]

Those threads earn so few points they're barely worth mentioning. I'm talking about point-earning. Technical threads earn lots of points, and are in the scope of this discussion because of it.

I will point out, though, that throwing code over the wall doesn't necessarily point toward one forum being more technical than another. A discussion on type systems or hygienic macros has far more technical depth than someone responding to a post with a code example of how to do something in React.

[fragmede]

Even if they do, the number of people on HN that are able to give well-versed, in-depth comments, that are also accessible to a broader audience on a technical subject (eg BPF and eBPF) is vanishingly small, but also the number of readers for deep topics (deep, not technical vs non-technical eg wittgensteinproject.org) is also small, and are thus not worth farming for karma. For better or worse.