[baubino]

This post makes me feel really old.

HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.

Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as opposed to communicating to promote or to manipulate or to drive traffic or to pull any number of other “levers”) is exceedingly a thing of the past.

[kqr]

> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.

That's an oversimplification. There are things that get responses because they're flamebait rather than interesting, and then even more interesting things that never get any discussion going.

I don't know if the residual factor is just "chance" or if there are controllable inputs involved.

(One thing I do suspect but cannot confirm is that article title has a large effect. Interesting stuff with bad title gets overlooked, and vice versa.)

[PaulRobinson]

The fact that HN does not work in exactly the same way as the horrid platforms out there that automagically surface things that make neurone in your head scream "click that thing! click it! look! LOOOOOOK!", does not mean your brain doesn't treat it the same way.

This isn't unique to this technology: books with interesting titles and covers sell better than books with boring titles and covers, even if the latter has more interesting content.

I think what makes HN a little different is that a lot of places we might congregate online only exist for the flamebait, or are specifically built around engagement metrics to serve DAU/MAU numbers and advertising asks. You just happen to take a bit more chance on here than you would anywhere else, and that's absolutely 100% a good thing.

If there are controllable inputs that skew you to one side of the variance, I hope the moment someone discovers them, they are shut down - otherwise this place just becomes another hell-hole.

[superdisk]

This is true. There are a few stock topics that will consistently get the fanboys out (Postgres, Ruby, Rust, SQLite) which is, IMO, usually just uninteresting fodder. And then interesting stuff which requires some intellectual engagement very often rots.

HN does have a much higher ratio of gems to dirt than any other place though, so I'm still here for the forseeable future :)

[underdeserver]

> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.

A simple way to refute this is to note that some links were posted multiple times and only got traction on the second or third time.

[PaulRobinson]

That's a feature, not a bug.

[satisfice]

Whether it's a feature or a bug, it's mysterious. Hence the question.

[pbhjpbhj]

I have the impression that there's a dashboard that the admins use for "second chance" to allow them to schedule stories they think didn't do as well as expected, to give those stories a second (third?) bite at the cherry.

One sometimes sees suggestions from @dang to resubmit, and/or comments about giving stories another go around if they did worse than expected.

The only other manual intervention at that level I've heard of is to promote Ycombinator companies; but I'm not sure what complexion that takes.

There's possibly some manual actions around vouchs/flags, to revive comments that got flagged and have now been vouched for. Maybe it's all automated but I suspect there's judgement applied there; just based on how the site is run in general.

No particular insight, just been around here for ~15 years (eek!).

[nickthegreek]

like many things in life, timing is an important variable.

[PaulRobinson]

Couldn't agree with you more. The internet has, to borrow the word of the moment, become enshittified, and people think that's "normal".

People accept that platforms should be centralised, and that they should harvest your data in order to sell it to adtech companies who will then feed it to an industry that learns in real-time how to prey on your darkest fears to sell you things you don't need but might make you feel slightly less sad for a second. And people just accept it: that's normal these days.

They even call it doom-scrolling, and don't ask "wait, should I want to scroll through actual doom? Is the occasional video that makes me smile really worth it all?"

Perhaps it's my age, but I can't understand anybody who says their main form of media consumption is YouTube. How? How do you actually put up with that, knowing what is behind every mouse movement and click, and the knowledge that every single pixel in front of you is being tweaked by robotic neuroscientists squeezing every drop out of A/B tests to make you feel like utter crap? Like, seriously, WTAF?

HN is popular within its niche precisely because it isn't like that. It is not "a platform", in the modern and now normalised sense. It links out to other sites and asks people to come back together to discuss what they saw there. Old school. No ad tracking. No doom scrolling. Pick what you like. Click it, don't click it. Discuss it, don't discuss it. Nobody is tracking "engagement". There's some gamification, but does anyone _really_ care?

This type of interaction is entirely native to my generation and older (I just squeak into millennial, on the older side), but feels completely bonkers to people who think Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are what is normal and how the Internet works.

Some of know they're not normal. We know they're aberrations, ghouls that prey on unwitting masses.

[keiferski]

YouTube is easily the best “social network” in terms of having high-quality content with minimal manipulation. And I definitely consider it my main form of media consumption.

You just have to curate your feed and add stuff to playlists, not watch whatever is on the logged-out default home page.

[RGamma]

Is watching videos considered a social activity now? The word "social" truly seems to have been tortured to death.

[lukan]

What? You have to do a lot of curation and fighting the service itself (hiding shorts) to get to a bearable level. And I did not spend hours clicking things I don't like. I mostly just watch movies/clips I want, but my recommendations are full of clickbait manipulative garbage. So yes, one can find jewels in it - but only if digging through the garbage first.

[keiferski]

I watch a ton of great content by people that I subscribe to. It's not difficult or complicated to get there.

Not sure what else to say.

[lukan]

But you don't agree it took a lot of effort to hide the garbage?

[keiferski]

Not really, if anything, there is too much stuff I want to watch that is suggested to me.

I suppose if you created an account today you'd be fed a lot of garbage, but I've been watching YouTube often for at least a couple years.