Comment by heliumtera
3 days ago
>It's frustrating that better content is not always rewarded
It could be. Maybe we just fail to create better content, despite the effort put in. Maybe your frustration comes from lack of engagement, maybe your effort was lost in the ether and no one noticed... But getting noticed could be one criteria to evaluate how good content is. You perform better while not creating the content you consider better. Or captivating an audience to appreciate the better. You see, they don't.
Do you have a blog? It sounds like you would enjoy that.
I do have a blog [0] that I occasionally (I think I’m averaging once a year haha) post to. And it’s possible that trying to create better content has the opposite effect, though I’m prouder of the stuff I put more thought/effort into so even if it results in worse content for others, it’s something I want to put my name on.
[0] https://joshstrange.com
I was not suggesting that quality is inversely proportional to effort, but that could be true on this heterogeneous medium. Targeting a spread audience requires disproportional effort to soften ideas and not offend and put off. Done right, the "good" content will be polished and blend in, not getting noticed. While superficial this is obvious, designing content to be positive is designing it to be invisible. I don't think this applies to a blog because the audience was designed, whoever found the content already has a good number of characteristics you can assume. Incentives on hacker news are very pervasive and it is designed, literally, to relay a particular kind of narrative: more power to the middle man, if the middle man is backed by the good guys.
Ty for the blog reference, will check it for sure.