hhm was my previous username, but I lost its password now. Probably after switching accounts some years ago, after becoming a little paranoid about internet identity (I even sent a mail asking pg to remove that account... he was smarter than me and said he wouldn't do that; thanks pg). I now realize I shouldn't care so much about that really.
By that time, I realized that it might be easy to get into the leaderboard just by posting quality links of stuff I was interested into. I put some effort into that by some time and I reached (I think) the 10th place. I stored a screenshot about that, named something like "and-what-was-that-for.jpg" that I can't find right now. But I remember noticing a couple things about that experience:
- how empty it was after I achieved that random objective... it was just some score, and it didn't serve any useful purpose, so once I achieved it I couldn't feel too happy about it
and the most interesting bit:
- it was very easy to get into, say, the 20th or 15th spot. But then raising into the 10th spot was much harder. I understood that people between 15 - 200 weren't trying to reach that kind of score, or they weren't trying too hard. People don't compete too much. Then when approximating the 10th spot, I found that it was getting increasingly harder. I'm sure somebody trying to get into the 1st or 2nd spot would have to spend an amazing amount of work into that.
It was just a game I played for some short span of time, then I quit. Now I miss that account a little bit :)
A few months ago I decided to focus on high quality comments after feeling like I was contributing to the HN noise a bit too much.
As a proxy for that, I tracked my average comment score, trying to get it above 10.
Today it's 14.93, which is quite high - only 4 of the top 100 are higher.
I think my comment quality has risen substantially, but I also subconsciously started making decisions based on score - not posting on topics that were sliding down the front page, or where there were already hundreds of comments but I did have something to say.
In short, the gamification overtook the original goal, and the tail was wagging the dog.
I've now started using a much simpler method - taking a deep breath before hitting reply, and trashing the comment if I don't think I'm adding anything to the conversation. I like this way more.
This is (I think) my fifth account here - the rest have all been hellbanned, sometimes because I deserved it, sometimes not.
The first couple of times I was banned it hurt me maybe more than one would expect. I took it personally, I thought about it deeply, I really took it as a wake-up call. I thought long and hard about what was wrong with my personality that the (IMO) best community on the web would actively act to expel me.
One of my later accounts, I acted like you're describing. I tried hard to stay "on message" and to write the kind of things I theorised HN would want to hear.
I think I snapped at one point and yelled at someone. That account is, of course, now hellbanned along with all the rest. I don't even remember the username. By the way, my first account here was either on the leaderboard or maybe a few points off. It was a long time ago.
These days I am more zen-like about the whole thing. I mostly write what I want. I do try not to be abusive - my character is flawed enough that sometimes that's what comes naturally. If I get banned, well, that's life. But I do what you say, taking a second to think about whether my comment adds something - if it doesn't, I just delete it and move on. I think that's perhaps a sign of maturity, when you're willing to throw away your own words (that you might have spent half an hour perfecting) because you recognise they're probably more destructive than constructive to the community you respect.
Did pg give a reason for not wanting to remove the account or did he ever write about why he wouldn't delete accounts? I have my guesses but I'm curious what his specific reasons would be.
I asked if he could either remove my account or comments. He said that the comments are part of other people's conversations, so he didn't want to remove all of them (later he asked if I had some specific comments I wanted to remove, and what were my reasons to want to remove all of them). By then I realized he was right.
hhm was my previous username, but I lost its password now. Probably after switching accounts some years ago, after becoming a little paranoid about internet identity (I even sent a mail asking pg to remove that account... he was smarter than me and said he wouldn't do that; thanks pg). I now realize I shouldn't care so much about that really.
By that time, I realized that it might be easy to get into the leaderboard just by posting quality links of stuff I was interested into. I put some effort into that by some time and I reached (I think) the 10th place. I stored a screenshot about that, named something like "and-what-was-that-for.jpg" that I can't find right now. But I remember noticing a couple things about that experience:
- how empty it was after I achieved that random objective... it was just some score, and it didn't serve any useful purpose, so once I achieved it I couldn't feel too happy about it
and the most interesting bit:
- it was very easy to get into, say, the 20th or 15th spot. But then raising into the 10th spot was much harder. I understood that people between 15 - 200 weren't trying to reach that kind of score, or they weren't trying too hard. People don't compete too much. Then when approximating the 10th spot, I found that it was getting increasingly harder. I'm sure somebody trying to get into the 1st or 2nd spot would have to spend an amazing amount of work into that.
It was just a game I played for some short span of time, then I quit. Now I miss that account a little bit :)