I agree and it can be very frustrating. You put a lot of effort into something and get almost no feedback/traffic (I also don’t write for money or make money from my blog, but it’s nice to see people read it) and then you can write a pithy comment or post that doesn’t dig into the nuance and it will blow up.
Some of my highest upvoted HN comments are 1-2 sentences but when I’ve responded or posted something well thought out or detailed it sometimes gets no votes/replies.
I try to “forget” this phenomenon because I don’t want to trend towards one-liners optimizing for engagement but every time a throwaway comment blows up I get somewhat frustrated that the well-reasoned reply/comment I wrote the previous day/hour/minute was ignored.
Thankfully I’ve had longer comments/posts gain traction so I know it does happen. I wrote a detailed blog post [0] on the Kroger (grocery store) app and posted it to HN but it got no upvotes (maybe 1-2) and didn’t get any comments. Thankfully, and this was news to me, the HN mods will occasionally take a post they liked that didn’t get attention and throw it on the front page to give it some more visibility (and then it can sink or swim on its own). They did that for this post and I got to participate in some enjoyable discussions on the topic.
That’s really what drives me to write (which I do rarely), the resulting discussion/feedback, well at least it’s a close second to just getting my ideas down on “paper” which forces me to think about them in new/interesting ways. More than once I’ve gone into writing a blog post thinking a certain way then I’ve changed or altered my thinking after putting my initial thoughts on the page.
Probably half of my posts that hit the front page got there via the second chance pool. It feels like dang is single-handedly turning back the tides of the internet by hand-picking links.
Some of my highest upvoted HN comments are 1-2 sentences but when I’ve responded or posted something well thought out or detailed it sometimes gets no votes/replies.
I try to “forget” this phenomenon because I don’t want to trend towards one-liners optimizing for engagement but every time a throwaway comment blows up I get somewhat frustrated that the well-reasoned reply/comment I wrote the previous day/hour/minute was ignored.
Thankfully I’ve had longer comments/posts gain traction so I know it does happen. I wrote a detailed blog post [0] on the Kroger (grocery store) app and posted it to HN but it got no upvotes (maybe 1-2) and didn’t get any comments. Thankfully, and this was news to me, the HN mods will occasionally take a post they liked that didn’t get attention and throw it on the front page to give it some more visibility (and then it can sink or swim on its own). They did that for this post and I got to participate in some enjoyable discussions on the topic.
That’s really what drives me to write (which I do rarely), the resulting discussion/feedback, well at least it’s a close second to just getting my ideas down on “paper” which forces me to think about them in new/interesting ways. More than once I’ve gone into writing a blog post thinking a certain way then I’ve changed or altered my thinking after putting my initial thoughts on the page.
[0] https://joshstrange.com/2024/02/11/krogers-digital-struggle/