>Your points may be valid but your post makes it seem like you’re mostly just upset your submissions didn’t get any recognition.

I'm certainly not pleased about it.

>I don’t think HN is a bastion of meritocracy or being amazing either FYI.

Part of the issue is with the name, perhaps. This website portrays itself as a hacker venue, but my Lisp and machine code articles receive nothing, whereas people wrapping HTML and JavaScript around programs others wrote, reimplementing something worse in Rust, or even commenting on something that happened on Reddit receives hundreds of comments and Internet points. I couldn't care less about the points, but surely you understand it would be frustrating for a place that claims to be about hackers to do this. Perhaps I wouldn't feel this way if it had remained Startup News.

Of particular note and relevant to this main topic, I wasn't the first to submit my articles to Hacker News. Someone else was in an IRC channel with me discussing one of my projects and, in pursuit of Internet points, uploaded it without even asking me. To see my work put on Hacker News so someone could get points is one thing and then for it to be entirely ignored is an additional insult. Surely you understand some of how I feel, with this.

How does the website portray itself in that way? Or claim in any way? I don’t think it does. Besides the name of the site? A name doesn’t mean much. It’s just that. Not a description. A common example is the name of various political parties and powers that has little or nothing to do with what they are.

It actually would be weird for YCombinator’s only news aggregator site to be only about hard programming “hacking”. It’s an established huge incubator of startups. So naturally the news aggregator site itself will be broader than just hard programming “hacking” as YC has matured.

Also I assumed hacking has multiple meanings. Hacking together code is a common enough phrase. So that would include doing web dev stuff. The front page doesn’t usually consist of just html wrappers.

I think you are blaming something that isn’t a problem. The problem seems to be this site isn’t what you want. And the site never pretended to be what you wanted either.

And the whole point of news aggregators is for anyone to be able to post something. You’re again upset at the whole point of this site. There was no illusion or trickery. This is how modern Web 2.0 news aggregators work. You’re also assuming the person did it for internet points. And upset at that. Which makes it seem like you want to do it for internet points.

>How does the website portray itself in that way? Or claim in any way? I don’t think it does. Besides the name of the site?

Hacker News by any other name would be just as sweet, and that's not very sweet, but the name still matters and influences perception.

>It actually would be weird for YCombinator’s only news aggregator site to be only about hard programming “hacking”. It’s an established huge incubator of startups. So naturally the news aggregator site itself will be broader than just hard programming “hacking” as YC has matured.

Again, the name Startup News was more appropriate. Now, in my eyes, the only purpose of websites with this design, including Hacker News and Lobsters and Reddit, is self-promotion and related activities. This design of discussing almost entirely things that are happening elsewhere is only amicable to these activities, I think.

>I think you are blaming something that isn’t a problem. The problem seems to be this site isn’t what you want. And the site never pretended to be what you wanted either.

Well, when you wanted to announce something thirty years ago, you could use Usenet. I've looked for other venues, and found some, but that doesn't change that Hacker News still, somehow, amasses a decent amount technically-inclined people. I did give Lobsters a try, to less disappointment, but unfortunately that created a slippery slope that has me having an account here; Hacker News makes Lobsters look good in much the same way Reddit makes Hacker News look good. The only reason I upload any of my articles here is because that one fellow did and the utter lack of interest displeased me.

>And the whole point of news aggregators is for anyone to be able to post something. You’re again upset at the whole point of this site. There was no illusion or trickery. This is how modern Web 2.0 news aggregators work. You’re also assuming the person did it for internet points. And upset at that. Which makes it seem like you want to do it for internet points.

Again, I don't care at all about these meaningless points. The only reason I bother having any here is because the design of this website forces one to collect them, lest posts be hidden, among other things. Now, I have nice discussions and pleasant interactions about my work elsewhere, under better systems, but there's little cost to me of uploading my work to Hacker News, at this point, and so I may as well continue doing so.