Shouldn't this be a "Ask HN" or something similar? Also, let's not make AMAs a thing on HN. Better to post an interesting link and then engage with people in the comments.
I did a bit of homework before posting this, and there were just enough Hacker News hits on "AMA" (from Sam Altman, Peter Roberts, etc.) that it didn't look like there would be any harm in trying this experiment.
I could certainly try an "Ask HN" at some point, but haven't been able to think exactly what question I would ask. "How many people know what a reverse caber tosser is?" is one that I'm curious about, but I suspect I'd get mostly just crickets. Really I wanted other people to ask questions... and I'm having lots of fun with the results so far!
There is harm, yes. Regularly hosting AMAs will turn this website into a social platform like reddit. Regular discussion will die down as personalities take over. It's the quick road to decline. The internet isn't what it used to be, public forums need to be guarded from the influx of low-quality commenters that consider everything a social platform first and throw regular, on-topic discussion out of the window. In time, low-quality and high-quality commenters form two groups and when they interact, the high-quality commenters leave.
The site is a social platform as it is and AMAs by knowledgable people that fit the forum are totally fine on HN. 'HN is turning (or is going to turn) into reddit' is trope as old as the site. This post and its thread were of higher quality than most HN threads so if something is going to ruin HN, it's not going to be this AMA.
I took a day off of work yesterday to try this AMA idea out, and I'm thinking it turned out pretty well all in all. It was definitely a one-time experiment, though, not something I'll do again.
Something just occurred to me from a review of recent HN item titles: maybe what I _will_ try sometime is a "Show HN" post, for some shiny new Life discovery that seems particularly interesting.
Show HN is pretty specific and has its own weird rules (linked in the show tab up top). It’s mostly for things people have made that can be tried out. You should definitely post interesting things you’ve found, if they don’t fit Show HN, you can just skip the Show HN prefix and avoid the bureaucracy.
Thanks, that's a big help! I think actually the Conway's Life community does quite regularly have "interesting things" that could fit the Show HN model.
The example I'm thinking most about is the fixed-cost 15-glider construction for absolutely anything that's glider-constructible at all --
for which we do have some eminently runnable code that showcases the entire process of 15-glider construction from beginning to end, with subtitles ...
... running inside Golly, but that's a free download, and the Lua script version doesn't need any extra Python installation or configuration or anything.
So if I don't get too much "Nah don't do that" feedback here, I might try putting up a Show HN post for the new super-optimized RCT15 project, once the last pieces of that get completed.
