Submit to product hunt8/2/2023 ![]() ![]() When we downweight, we try to use a light touch. It's not about what we personally believe, or have a vested interest in, or even what we happen to be interested in ourselves, with the possible exception of APL. (We'd love to make it not be needed, but that's a hard problem.) Our criteria for downweighting come from a general sense of what attracts upvotes for reasons other than intellectual interest. User flags and software take care of much, but not all, so moderation is needed. The flowers are stories that gratify intellectual curiosity, and to have these we must protect the garden against weeds, rabbits, motor vehicles, and other things that otherwise would soon take over. Why? Because pure upvoting optimizes for other things than intellectual curiosity, such as outrage, gossip, and gaming the system. All try to optimize HN for the core value of the site-intellectual curiosity-and all are mechanisms to countervail the upvoting system in some way. Here are all the things that can make a post fall in rank: user flags, software penalties (for voting rings, flamewars, etc.), and moderator downweights. If you want a response to this and you don't see one here in the next few hours (I'll try, but can't right now), you're welcome to email The short version is that you're partly right on #2 but probably less than you think, and definitely not on #3.Įdit: ok, here you go. It will be worse (kind of it already is) when PH becomes a very mainstream player of product launches. It felt like they feed information to the visitors (their audience I mean - me, us) and the visitors are supposed to take everything at a face value. It is like a walled garden, or a house where you can take a peek but can't choose the window, or the perspective. Then they have this - very few people can vote or comment, others can just visit their sites even though they are willing to login via Twitter and in fact do login via Twitter. There are other such venues and many a times I would find same products listed there too and the their relative rankings would be very different. Also, not always the top listing was mediocre, sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't. What I mean is, I would see the front page apps/services and they would be mediocre a lot of times and then I would compare these front page listings to what I used to see earlier and I would find that the trend is changing. This post makes sense to me in a way that I half understood earlier. It's a weird situation for an introvert, to want to be able to contribute to a community I have extracted so much value from, in hopes of adding some back to it in whatever way I can, but also being somewhat terrified of getting absorbed into the echo chamber. This type of stuff is why I have been afraid for years to contribute to sites like Hacker News, even though I have been lurking on this site for five or six years. Deciding to take this approach has probably hurt my career as a developer in many ways. ![]() I bought into a lot of the rhetoric of the endless meritocracy early on, and found the wizard behind the curtain is still often based upon the ol' boys club. There appears to be a strong component of success-by-networking in the tech industry that I have tried to opt out of, largely because I am afraid that if I get too deep into the networking games, I will begin to lose an objective sense of what I can accomplish technically, and no longer be able to personally calibrate for myself whether or not my work can stand successfully on its own. I have been better or worse at it at different times. It is one of the things I dislike most about Silicon Valley, and is something I have tried hard to make sure I can avoid in some way or another. PH presents as egalitarian and meritocratic, but that's clearly horseshit.įrom my experiences, Product Hunt is largely a byproduct of a greater scene in which this is very often the case. ![]()
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