I never submit my articles to Hacker News or pretty much any news aggregation site. To me it’s more valuable to see if something I’ve worked on is worthy of HN, whether my intent is to educate or just piss off whiny shit-talking trolls. To me, the value of a natural feedback system is greater than any promotional value I would get out of submitting things myself.
The interesting effect of this is that many of my essays and blog posts get re-posted numerous times during the year. Yesterday my essay The Master, The Expert, The Programmer was re-posted and people had generally positive comments, even on reddit, which is kind of nice.
The obvious downside to this is when people post that I’m moving to San Francisco for a job, or where I work, or that I took a shit at 10am on Tuesday. But, that’s the price you pay for being a public persona with fans. Sometimes they want to know things about you that are a bit too intimate.
Recently though I ran into an excellent positive result of the HN barometer. I’ve been working on Fret War quite hard and talking about it here (but never posting it to HN) and I noticed that whenever my post about Fret War hit HN it mentioned that you play “randomly generated music”.
Problem is, it hasn’t been that way since Round 2. I ditched that idea because, well guitarists are gigantic pussies. I hate to say it, but they’d rather talk smack about being able to play than actually play. Put up sheet music and they won’t play. Put up any melody or riffs and they won’t play. Put up more than 3 chords in a blues and they won’t play. Of course, it’s never because it’s too hard, it’s always because it’s “boring” or “tedious”.
But that’s just my opinion. The site isn’t just for me, it’s for trying to get guitarists to publish and write music online and have fun. So I scrapped my original idea, shoved my ego aside, and quit making it about anything randomly generated. Instead, I do it more like a game show, where I craft a round with a fun title like The Locusts of Locrian and shift between very open and very strict rounds to stretch the player’s abilities.
This has been working great, and really you should hear the stuff people make. Based on how well people are playing these newly crafted more creative rounds I’d say I was totally and completely wrong to try to make people play randomly generated music.
I was wrong. Now, how many times do you hear a pundit say that!?
I went through the whole site, recrafted the game to not be about randomly generated music, and started building out all the features. Fret War was not going to be about randomly generated anything. It was about people crafting songs based on a gameshow style challenge.
Let me repeat:
Yet, still it would hit HN and people would say the music is randomly generated. I thought this was nothing more than “Hacker Knowledge Half-life” where once a nerd gets a bit of knowledge in their head it’s damn near impossible to change it. They’ll evaluate a piece of software in the early stages, find a flaw or something they disagree with, and then that’s it. They never look at it again. They don’t update their understanding. It has become frozen in carbonite forever.
Remember though that I think of HN as a barometer of what people think. It’s a massively uncontrolled survey that tells me what’s going on. That means, if they think it’s randomly generated music, then that has to be coming from somewhere. It could be some more influential blog, it could be a troll slinging FUD, or it could be mentioned somewhere on my site still.
I ruled out the first two. It wasn’t a blog or some comment people referenced. It wasn’t a troll posting it that way (I think). Maybe it was still mentioned somewhere and I had missed it.
So I grabbed ack and started searching for “[Rr]andom”. Didn’t find anything. Then I accidentally used grep on the command line because of muscle memory and what do you know: it was still mentioned in the about page but ack didn’t pick it up because that’s a text file. DAMN!
Thank you Hacker News, you found the one place on the entire site that still mentioned randomly music. If you find more places where it sounds like this is the case let me know.
Of course this means that the half-life is still in effect and that the people visiting Fret War aren’t reading the rest of the site, any of the rounds, or listening to any of the music.
That’ll be the next thing I try to tackle.