Zigabyte
It only gets more interesting with each day :)
In the context of Hacker News, disagreement is welcomed (in a way even encouraged) as long as it is constructional and argumentative.
Again, depends on what the community accepts and wants. I agree politically sensitive topics are turmoil, but it doesn’t take much for a community to be accepting of different views.
If the goal is to feed intellectual curiosity, another way of seeing things is always welcomed as long as it is written well
This is why I think downvoting submissions/comments is needed. I like how Hacker News forum does it. You need to have a certain number of upvotes on your contributions to even be able to downvote, and if the comment or a reply receives a lot of downvotes it gets greyed out or collapsed.
But again, ability to downvote is not enough, users needs to be aligned on what they want their community to look like. In case of HN, a very devoted and unique community, theres no patience for low effort, agresive and funny without a cause submissions. Their Guidelines itself is a really wonderful read.
I am actually just writing an essay on this, I’m gonna nonchalantly past a couple of paragraphs relevant to the question.
Would it be proper advice if it wasn’t the always present: “Just start”?
It’s one of those simple but hard-to-follow rules that almost every aspect of everyday life things we try to get better at has. Just start is such a good piece of advice, because once you have written something down, you give yourself different reference points to think about under the shower, on the run, or at the store, and all of a sudden you come up with something new that further enriches your text. Its a collection of ideas that come at you randomly. The more often you think about a certain problem you want to write about, the deper you will go. Repeat this over a couple of iterations and you get a well-written collection of words.
What it also gives you is the space to think about these words, to think about the flow, narration, and intention. For the longest time I had a misperception that when you sit down to do something, it has to be done straight away. Some people are just such masterminds that they have a constant flow of good ideas. But then I heard someone famous say that “here’s a song that I worked on for a couple of months” and all of a sudden it made sense, that writing is a process, a chain of iterations.
This first iteration usually won’t be good because each paragraph is still an isolated piece on its own. Imagine the writing as being a color painting. The paragraphs don’t yet have a common color board, each is its own flavor and next to each other they don’t yet taste good. There is no color overflow from one idea to the next one. But when you reread it in a day or two, you can feel the flow of words without having to think too much about it. You are able to see different paragraphs carrying the same idea that can in different order have a much better sound or narration.
Don’t be afraid of bad writing because it is inevitable. But have a process that will improve it as the iterations happen. What I’m looking for when I am creating something is the unique aspect of my idea, something that makes the piece original & interesting. How to turn something boring, that has been said a million times into something interesting. It can be playfulness between sentences, the interlinking between seemingly different paragraphs, or a small ongoing joke through the text that makes it relatable.
Even this pasting over for this comment made the draft of the essay now completely different. I see the unnecessary sentences, and as I had to rephrase a couple of sentences, I see what narration might look better. Hope it makes sense!
What’s even cooler here is I feel we have the opportunity to have neighboring villages: I’m a villager in my instance, you’re a villager in your instance, and civility and understanding is promoted because we are in a real sense representatives of our respective villages. We don’t want to make our villages look bad.
Such a nice point! You gave me something to think about now :) In a way, while you are still anonymous, the instance gives you an outside identity. You don’t have to remember the username to “know someone from the village” in a way the author describes it, the instance kinda already gives you this.
