riki.house ends up on Hacker News and I laugh about it

Short post to laugh at some silliness and self-reflect.

A month ago someone apparently ended up putting one of my posts on the orange website, which is the first time that has happened.

I got the news yesterday from my friend naricane, who participates in public programmer discourse more actively than I do. So technically, this is not really “news” at this point, but that’s beside the point.

Either way, at the time of writing this, the submission has garnered 51 points and 23 comments. Good amount of points, scary point-to-comment ratio, let’s take a look at the comments.

• There is one mentioning std::format.
• There are a couple pointing out a typo I had made.
• The obvious “how many CVEs” comment.
• A couple of opinions.

This is not a post about responding to those comments. If I wanted to, I would just log onto the website and write there.

What I do want to point out is something more meta: how weird I felt reading these. There are these random internet people, talking behind my back, about points I didn’t touch on, or typos I made in the post.

The funny thing is how out of all of those that had any criticism, noone actually bothered emailing me what they had to say.

Like… my email’s just there, on the homepage? Hello??

I imagine it’s a thing that’ll keep happening with any post that goes at least somewhat viral, and I kind of don’t really know what to think about it.

I guess the weirdness of my feelings comes from the fact that I want this blog to help me connect with people. To find people to talk about my weird interests, have real chats with real humans across the world, make friends. So when I see someone adding extra conversation points behind my back, or talking about mistakes I had made, it just feels like… I dunno.

Said in an extremely exaggerated way, it is like my work is being laughed at and ripped apart by perching vultures, who will dismantle all your arguments to pieces just to prove their own self-righteousness, while at the same time saying nothing of substance.

And they do it all behind your back.

A thing that came to mind now, is that if I don’t feel very good when people act like this—when people talk behind your back—I wonder if I do that, too. It’s time for a moment of self-reflection.

This is my Lobsters comment list. It may look different than it does for me, when you read it. If you see anything off, please tell me. I don’t wanna be a bad person online.

Looking through it, most contributions are related to tangents people bring up. Answering people’s questions, participating in the discussion that’s happening in the comments, rather than engaging with the blog post directly.

One comment I had made, I feel like could have additionally been an email to the author, because it adds something interesting to the point raised in the post—this makes me think I should email people more!

So I think I’m in a pretty good standing in that regard. Feel free to email me if you think otherwise!

A thing you might say is, “why don’t you read Hacker News, then?”
In which case, please read the above post once again.

Would you want to participate in a community like that?

I don’t.

Also their website sucks.

I can’t count the number of times it rejected my request with a stupid ass text/plain Sorry. response. And the parts of the UI that aren’t the front page all look like garbage. Arguably the front page looks rather dated, too, but at least it looks somewhat presentable.

Hacker News is a terrible, undercooked piece of software, and I don’t wanna use it.

Anyways, enough of this reflection piece. Have a nice day!

And feel free to shoot me an email or Discord message if you wanna chat about whatever.
I’m a real person, too!