[next time] Could you just combine the two please so that I can enjoy voting up both the great one-liner and the pithy insight. I love humor, and I have a soft spot for great one-liners. My point is that others are the same way, and sometimes the jokes get more karma than the meaty content. That's not good for the board over the long term.
Whenever I find myself wanting to throw out a one-liner, I make myself stop and find something useful for others (or usually I don't post at all)
When I feel I absolutely must post a snarky one liner, I try to add on an actual decent comment at the end of it. It gets the joke out there, but hopefully doesn't add to the noise.
It's totally lame and the example is, indeed, perfectly lame. But there's a trivial way to make these good which, if you look at dang-scoldings of lame one liners, works surprisingly well for a huge number of them, not just yours:
Write the one liner and then imagine you got a moderator scolding.
Then write a comment defending your one liner from the charge of 'unsubstantiveness'. Finally, delete the one liner and post the defense.
I bet you'd almost never get scolded for these and the upvotes would be even bigger.
Somehow I end up not following my own advice and simplifying and making only one point per comment. That way people wouldn't focus on a minor thing about it and ignore the rest of it.
(The advice being: I think a good part of the reason why some one-line comments end up getting so many upvotes is because they say only one thing. The more things you try to say then the more reasons there will be for people to disagree and downvote you so no one else reads your message.)
When you say you've learned your lesson, do you mean you'll upvote thought-provoking, longer comments in the future? If so, I wish you good luck, but I'm skeptical about your potential success.
I've had my news.yc account for almost 2 years now, and it has always worked this way. Pithy 1-liners get upvotes; longer thoughtful comments often languish.
We're all in a hurry, so we're more likely to read shorter comments. The longer a comment is, and the more it makes us think, the less likely we are to expend the effort. The most valuable comments are ones that can change our thinking, and by nature such comments will seem wrong or unimportant when we look at them with our current thinking. The problem is human, not technological.
It's easier for me to change what I do than to change what others do, so I've adjusted my comment style to be shorter. Sometimes that means I pass up the chance to share deep thoughts. Other times it makes me more effective. For example, both ericb's and my comments made the same point, but mine drove it home better, didn't it? Upvote with a clear conscience. :-)
A snark one-two liner sitting on the top of the comment page is hardly a comment that's adding anything interesting
As a wise man once said, and I paraphrase: So basically anything upvoted by this community is considered on topic since enough people deemed it worthwhile.
> Also, remember that leaving a comment (even a thoughtful one) without also leaving an upvote acts as an implicit downvote and will eventually trigger the flamewar detector in a thread.
This happens if the post has at least 20 or 40 comments (I don't remember the number now). Most post in https://news.ycombinator.com/newest die with no of very few comments and upvotes, so most of the times it's not bad to add a comment to an obscure post. Sometimes a post is not good enough for upvoting, but it looks promising and the author may have some interesting insight.
This is the best approach. I too enjoy the occasional witty/funny but well-placed comment, and being open about it being lighthearted helps a lot to avoid downvotes.
Because sometimes an up vote isn't enough: I have nothing more to add other than complimenting you on a very insightful comment that said in one sentence what has taken me paragraphs.
I include 1-comment threads in 'related' lists, especially when they're old, because it can be interesting to see what the 1 comment was from 10 years ago or whenever.
However, you're right about that case because the 1 comment was not that interesting. I'll take it out of the list above. Thanks!
While I think this is a good submission (and upvoted it, despite being a Mozillite), it's in bad form to post comments on one submission to drive clicks to one of your own, even if it's related to the high-level topic, unless it's a continuation of a dialogue that's going on in a thread.
OTOH, there are threads that are just way too interesting, but get virtually no contributions.
Here is a thread with one comment and one upvote, both mine, and it just has the potential of being very rewarding, IF the person who started has any intention to continue:
I find it a bit sad that this comment has almost more votes than the parent post, which has several insightful points. This comment picks out only a single issue (although an important one), but does ignore all the other statements. I would hope people stop upvoting such a comment at 20 points max.
I can't seem to find it, but there was once a comment or page by PG which explained the core of good follow-up comments: not picking out a single item which is easy to criticise, but rather responding to the core of the parent comment.
I upvoted because I found the comment useful. I honestly didn't even see the one line at the end until you called it out. No problem here, please keep the summaries coming. I find them valuable.
I agree it was probably redundant; however, I was the first person other than OP to upvote the post and comment on it. I thought it was a good read, didn't want it to get buried, so upvoted and left a brief comment. Will refrain from doing the commenting next time.
I had to chuckle and then felt sad that you wrote one of the few meaningful comments - one that wasn't some sort of joke or the 10000th repost of an xkcd - and promptly got downvotes for it.
That's definitely also why some of us comment. Why we have to even though we might not feel like it. https://i.imgur.com/yE6kV9y.jpg
One of my recent comments was a summary of a post. I think it's my most voted up comment of my entire time at HN - a post wherein I went out of my way to try and add near enough nothing at all. It suggests that people value me not saying more than saying.
Compared to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466917 which took some effort. No votes at all and one reply which managed to avoid everything I wanted to talk about.
When writing said summary comment, I started off wanting to say "Look look, you have to look at that, it's brilliant, it's not the usual "my opinion about X" blog post!", but a summary seemed more fitting.
On the iPhone, I read comments first because they load and render quicker, and like concise summaries. It's not extra content as such, but it is a contribution.
[next time] Could you just combine the two please so that I can enjoy voting up both the great one-liner and the pithy insight. I love humor, and I have a soft spot for great one-liners. My point is that others are the same way, and sometimes the jokes get more karma than the meaty content. That's not good for the board over the long term.
Whenever I find myself wanting to throw out a one-liner, I make myself stop and find something useful for others (or usually I don't post at all)
Lame attempt at this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919298
Apologies for the meta-discussion. This is yet another of my bad habits...
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