Ask HN: How did you discovered HN?

11 points by coppolaemilio 5 years ago | 15 comments

I remember watching one of my repos (abandoned now) get a lot of stars out of nowhere and being super confused. Then one of the regular contributors told me "you are on the front page of HN" and I had no clue what HN was. After all that I couldn't stop coming back to this site. If it wasn't for that I don't know if I would have ever discovered it.

So I was wondering, how did you find out about HN?

ksaj 5 years ago |

I was getting fed up with how every comment section on Reddit devolves into nonsense - either trolling, arguing, or stupid memes. Don't get me wrong. Memes are fine in the right place - like Twitter. It has twit in the name for a reason... The problem is, no matter what the subject is or how the conversation is going, it eventually devolves into rubbish. Call me an old crank, but I find it extremely tiresome. It's like being an adult, but choosing to hang around with children with limited attention spans. If I wanted that, I'd just take up a babysitting job and turn everything into a Card Against Humanity game.

So one night, I just said my farewells, passed on the reins for a couple channels I administered, deleted all my messages and logged off. I had more than a year of Reddit Gold, but meh... it wasn't worth sticking around, even though parts of the Lounge are alright for general chatter.

Prior to this, I had seen a few mentions to articles here, and I checked it out. I actually read more of the comment sections than the articles - exactly what I was looking for. People actually discussing stuff.

HN's subjects are on par with what I look for, and people actually being able to converse civilly without turning everything into a meme or a flame fest is a huge bonus.

So, here I am. Feel free to send me HN Gold if it gets invented.

muzani 5 years ago | |

Yeah, this is one of the reasons I like HN. Memes are fun, but sometimes I just want to discuss stuff seriously. I'll still upvote a clever pun or subtle meme reference on HN, but no reason it should be at the top.

ksaj 5 years ago | | |

I love puns, but if a comment is only made for the sake of making the pun, it probably isn't adding anything to the discussion. A pun or meme-ish comment with additional actual content however, is much more conducive to conversation, and doesn't risk derailing or dead-ending an otherwise perfectly good thread.

kirubakaran 5 years ago |

I recently came across my (admittedly cringey) blog post from 2005 (that's 15 years ago!): https://kirubakaran.com/archive/2005-12-thoughts-of-paul-gra...

So turns out I discovered Paul Graham in 2005 via his "Great Hackers" talk, started following his essays, then discovered Reddit from that, and then Hacker News from that.

My HN profile says I created the account in Aug 10, 2007. But I remember lurking for a while, so I must have started using it a few months prior to that.

Seems like a lifetime ago.

mattmanser 5 years ago |

I was reading coding horror back in the 2000s when it was mentioned on that (Jeff Atwood's blog of Stack Overflow and Discourse fame, though he originally was known for his blog).

I think that triggered a large influx of new users right then so the community response was to post a ton of erlang articles to try and discourage new members and stave off an eternal september.

Seems like dang even got involved in that!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537347

trumbitta2 5 years ago |

IIRC, I discovered about YC back in 2011 from the book https://www.amazon.com/Startups-Open-Sourced-Jared-Tame-eboo...

Came to take a look, found HN.

brudgers 5 years ago |

Shopping oriented research for a new workstation class computer rekindled my interest in current tech after about a decade. Eventually, I wound up regularly looking at Techmeme. One day, there was a link to an HN discussion thread. In a few months, HN pretty much replaced Techmeme's river.

muzani 5 years ago |

I applied to YC, saw that they asked for HN handle and look positively on people who have said smart things on HN. So I suppose I should cut down on the trolling, lol.

giantg2 5 years ago |

I've been reading it for a long time. I only recently opened an account to comment/post. I think I heard about it from someone in one of my college classes.

cpach 5 years ago |

I probably found it via Paul Graham’s web site. I don’t remember exactly how I found his website, probably via his Lisp essays or “A Plan for Spam”.

lukaszkups 5 years ago |

I've learned about HN at my first job/apprenticeship from older coders 10 years ago. Same for twitter, basically :)

sushshshsh 5 years ago |

I've been here so long on so many banned accounts that I can't even remember how or why I got here

saluki 5 years ago |

I heard Mike or Rob mention it on the Startups For The Rest Of Us Podcast back in 2011.

codegeek 5 years ago |

I think I found Paul Graham's articles when googling for startup ideas and found HN as well.

oxygenz 5 years ago |

I've been interested in Ycombinator for a long time... saw a reference to hackernews