The Hacker News tarpit

Det är inte koden som gör Hacker News relevant

To be clear - this is not a post about how hard it is to build software. It's a post about how easy it is to build software, and how that easiness fools people into thinking they understand what they're looking at when they see a successful product.

Joan Westerberg vajbkodade HN på 3 timmar, drygast var CSS. Men ingen kommer att vara intresserad av denna klon om den hamnat på nätet.

Det beror på att den höga relevans HN besitter beror på andra saker. Sanningar lika gamla som Internet självt. Detta inlägg beskriver detta.

You can't build Place People Go as a feature. It's a thing that happened over time, through a specific and unrepeatable sequence of events, most of which were not planned and some of which were just luck.

Ett exempel taget ur den verklighet som fanns innan Internet:

There's a bar in your city where all the interesting people go on Thursday nights. The bar is not special. The drinks are mediocre, the lighting is bad, the bathrooms are questionable. But interesting people go there, which makes it interesting, which makes more interesting people go there. If you open an identical bar across the street with better drinks and better bathrooms, nobody is going to switch, because the interesting people are at the other bar. They all know they're at the other bar. There is no mechanism for coordinated switching.

Värd att läsa.