Arsalan Bashir | Jottings

My experiences with Hacker News.

20 January 2013  —

Last week, I jotted down a few words about open source software, and posted them here. Those were just things I had at the back of my head for a while now, and a free evening at a local coffee shop seemed like the perfect opportunity to translate those into my first blog post. When I wrote it, it all seemed fine. I was quite content, on being able to shell out a thousand words or so, and rushed to put it online. I put it up on a temporary spot, and thought it looked pretty. Then I made a "stupid mistake". In all my excitement I decided to post it on HackerNews. I ran Jekyll, and ran skimmed through it briefly on Localhost.

The next thing I know, it's on Hacker News. What followed was, well, not the best of experiences I've had.

A little pretext.

I was back from school, all set to enjoy a homework-less weekend. I had some coffee, I think it was a Robusta, and I was quickly filled with energy. Energy that I decided to spent furiously typing on my old linux box. Fifteen minutes through, I had already put down 1000 characters, and the clicky keyboard made me love each time I put down my finger to increase that number. I wrote about open source software, and before I knew it, I was on a rant.

An hour later, I was done. I proofread it a couple of times, and ran spell check. Now I needed a place to put it down on. I had a blog, but it was too ugly to even consider posting on. I'd hear a good word or two about Jekyll, so I decided to give it a shot. After snorting at some ugly templates I found here and there, I was convinced that the free ones weren't going to help.

My 17-year-old brain thought it'd be "okay" to save and modify the source code right off Zach Holman's blog. (Strike one.) I was so happy when I tested out my version of Zach Holman’s blog. (Guilty too, but mostly happy)

So I ran Jekyll, and after a little CSS tweaking, I was all set to upload the files. And I did.

The Armageddon.

I woke up the next morning to a tweet from Zach, saying it was "time to change your CSS and layout, buddy." Odd. That was rather quick. I mean, I did expect this, but not within 12 hours. Unless it got noticed on HN.

I headed over to Hacker News, and it suddenly made sense. I had gathered a lot of comments, up-votes, and replies to peoples' comments. I was happy, kinda. But then I started reading. It was one of those times, when you feel like you've bought knives to a gun fight. There we're paragraphs as tall as my screen, and several one-liner replies (mostly saying, "Yea! Totally!" in more complicated terminology.)

People seemed to have a problem with everything. Some made logically sound points, while most of them just criticized for the sake of criticizing. And upon refreshing the page, things only got worse. More comments, more demeaning statements and sharp questions flew my way. Some of my hacker-buddies who I know from Reddit and RHOK even called me up and sent me panic text messages.

Fixing the situation and the "moral" of the story.

I did nothing for 4 hours. Comments kept piling up. But I didn't reply.

I guess that was the best decision I made that weekend. The worst thing you can do in a situation like this, is to let your egoistic flare get the better of you and argue baselessly with people who commented. So I sat and thought about the situation.

I asked myself: Why had I written what I wrote? As soon as I had in mind what my intentions were while writing the article, I started noticing that the comments fell in two categories. The genuine comments, that included questions, logical points, and sane counter-arguments, and the "rest" which included slag and worthless comments. (I use the word "worthless" with great deliberation here. These comments don’t "contribute" anything to the wider argument, and they don't move the conversation forward. They simply hold on to one point and stretch it out, overlooking the fact that the point that they want to make is tangential to the discussion at hand.)

After 4 hours, I began the "self-bailout" process. My first reply went to Zach, and it was an apology. There's nothing more to this. I had copied his design, and it was a wrong thing to do, and hence I apologized to him without any further delay. He didn't reply, but after a quick look at his twitter feed, I came to the conclusion that it was a normal thing. I had been designing a new minimal look for my blog, and spent a few hours coding it.

Then I answered a few of the genuine comments, with mostly agreeing to what they had to say or stating why I disagreed. As for the "trolls," they went ignored. While I was replying, I noticed it wasn't all that bad. I had quite a few up-votes and had gained a few followers on twitter who tweeted the link to the article.

I discussed this incident with my friends over dinner. They told me to "vet" things before posting them on Hacker News, and not post stuff that people would disagree to (I'm not even sure how they thought I could figure out what people would disagree to, but to not sound snobbish, I played along.)

Later that evening I compiled my own thoughts and opinion about Hacker News. Hacker News is an amazing community of people. Sadly, there is a (fortunately) small percent of people who are, 'misfits' to say the least, in this community. In my opinion, it’s not the fact that people here are skilled enough to comment on the various topics that makes it special. That people here have the ability to think in more creative and vivid ways and have diverse opinions (some not always correct, as seen in the case of 'misfits') makes Hacker News an interesting place.

Hoping this doesn't sound cheesy, it's the little things about Hacker News that make it unique. Like Zach Holman who actually read my post (and quoted a part of it in his comment) instead of shutting the tab and going hay-way on twitter like anyone else would do. And like the people who posted genuine comments, who actually spent time analyzing the topic and putting their thoughts together in a comment.

Overall, I think Hacker News is not only a place to show your products, ask questions, and discuss issues at length, but also to get honest and critical opinion. It's this essence of being able to expose your thoughts and products to such critical thinkers (some hypercritical, at that) that will make me post this article on Hacker News too.

Just before closing this article, I've received another weird suggestions from one of my friends. It said "Tell them you're only 17!", and to that I can only laugh. What's the point of putting something up for receiving opinion and simultaneously telling them to perhaps not be as critical of what you've submitted because (quite literally) "I'm just a kid!" ?

I am never going to play the "I'm-a-kid" card, because in my opinion my work (not just articles from my blog, I also develop software that I like to show around on HN) are a result of my hardwork, and I think they deserve competing with set standards, and it'd be belittling to have them receive positive feedback just because they were submitted by a "kid"