Go to your professor's office hours, learn the names of your neighbors, become a regular at the local sandwich shop and shoot the breeze with staff, ask the people you're waiting in line alongside if they have any good jokes.
Don't be fooled that social media and conspicuous consumption are the best paths to community.
If you're going to strike up conversation with strangers, it's best if you make it easy for them. If you're asking for a joke, you're making it easy on yourself and setting a bar for them. I'm a jokester but I don't have a good repertoire of jokes on hand -- I respond to banter. So if you ask me if I have a joke, I often just sputter and throw out the last bad pun somebody shared with me.
Make a joke yourself, if you're feeling funny. But be warned... a stranger once asked me why I was going on a trip. I was visiting my dad who was presently in surgery for cancer that would go on to end his life. I was too emotional to answer with anything but the truth. I certainly wasn't going to respond well to humor.
As an introvert, one thing that works is that I repeatedly go to the same shops and restaurants so people know me and I know them, and we’re not strangers anymore.
This is something I've definitely lived by for many years. Nearly all of my colleagues and friends don't believe me when I say I'm an introvert. I purposely put the effort in to make meaningful connections with anyone I can and it has paid off more times than I could ever count. Is it exhausting? Absolutely. But in my mind, the alternative is worse. People are great. Get to know them.
> You do it because if you don't, then you'll be worse off years later.
This feels hyperbolic. While I would agree that community and remaining connected are very important to overall health, I don’t feel like making a habit of talking to strangers is a prerequisite.
> As a writer, receiving feedback on my work is welcome and rare. This blog gets thousands of readers a month, and yet the amount of direct feedback I’ve received over all the years is a small fraction of that.
If you don’t have any comment box it’s hard to give you any feedback.
It can be worse: on a recent post here[0] the author says the contact page on his blog "does nothing but wastes spammers time and effort"[1]. Granted, he links to an email on said page, but why include a fake contact form[2] on your page then?
What is the ideal approach for one? Assuming you don't want it to be a public one (to avoid moderation headaches), and you want to avoid automated spam, and your page is a static site, what is the ideal way to incorporate something like that?
I have a static blog with a public comments system using Disqus; it’s just a JS snippet and it works great. I’ve seen people (ab)using GitHub issues too, or even use gists for blog posts.
You're not kidding. There's neither comment box nor email address. Is he expecting us to cyberstalk him to find if someone has doxxed him, just to give a thumbs up?
"Why is nobody calling to invite me to parties", says man who unplugged his phone.
Edit: Ok, I'm old. For younger people, pretend I said "turned off his phone".
Yeah. Should we just magically infer that he likes getting non-gig contacts on his explicitly gig contact form? The form is under "Get in Touch", and under an offer for a 15 minute call. I don't want that.
This reminds me of a friend of mine who in a B2B setting contacted a potential vendor by filling in a form, with his email and phone number as contact details. Instead of emailing or calling back, this vendor continued the conversation by tracking down my friend on LinkedIn and messaging him there! They already had the email and phone number from their form.
I'm also not super impressed by the consulting gig's "Johnny Holton" reference talking about Jake's "engineering excellence". A google search says Johnny Holton is an American hand egg player.
If I were a potential client going in cold then this would not fill me with confidence in his attention to detail.
Few weeks ago someone here (let's call him $user) commented here that articles that would most benefited from picture often don't have one, to which someone replied calling it "$user's law", I wanted to comment how spot on the $user was but ultimately didn't and instead just upvoted. I was just about to complain here how I wish I commented so that could find it again, but then I thought, wait a minute, maybe hn tracks upvotes too, and sure enough it does, I was able to find the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001607
>
The more an article would benefit from photos, the less likely it’ll have them.
In contrast: A few years ago I was hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). One of the few rules to follow there is to explicitly leave no trace, in respect to nature and others.
People go to nature to interact with nature, not with traces of other human beings. You don't want to ride 4 hours to countryside only to find very same things you've been running away from.
In contrast, people go to blogs to find opinions, and traces of opinions of others are usually adding, not subtracting. One can say whole HN is a sandbox for sharing opinions, therefore "untouched" posts with no comments and low points are less attractive.
For me it is more like, i should have started leaving a trace before the invention of modern genAI, now maybe is late. I could have had a trusted trace to prove that I am a genuine human, now I get the impression that faceless new accounts/profiles or whatever are all fake and automatically managed.
It's never too late; the important part is to have a personality and your own opinions. AI is agreeable, they will just go along with whatever information they are prompted with, unless they get an explicit prompt to be disagreeable. But you as a human have morals, values, experience and knowledge that you can apply to e.g. leaving comments or writing things.
But this was good advice years ago too. The average Facebook or Youtube comment section feels like it's full of empty drones, repeated and predictable comments that don't actually add much. HN comments are a breath of fresh air in that regard. Reddit can be to some degree, as long as you filter out the predictable kneejerk reactions and "I also choose this guy's dead wife" meme comments.
You were probably thinking about geeks leaving heartwarming comments under a forgotten repository while reading this.
But what really makes a trace valuable? Internet growth has proven that scaling traces does not really grow value to the same extent.
> Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet.
At this exact moment in time there are literal thousands of creators that chase external validation, and millions of lurkers leaving 1-bit "like" reactions under their content. Let's go to popular instagram pages in a search of humanity.
> It helped you, so it’s likely a useful idea
Billions of reactions left on social media so far proved to be very poor indication of quality.
> You now have a profile you can access that collects the things you found noteworthy
In a world of content abundance one rarely has time or motivation to re-visit everything he/she reacted upon. This also works increasingly worse the more "traces" you leave, see #1 and #2.
The "traces" I love most is people who post complicated enough issues on github repos that show the depth of their use case.
Where there's some detail that's causing them problems, and they would not hit it unless they were actually making use of the project in a productive way. It's sort of the ultimate proof of the work I did being useful for somebody and a genuine motivator to resolve that issue for them too.
Ignoring the ironically missing way to respond to the post beyond the consult page, this is something I used to reliably do, for exactly this reason:
> First, it’s positive and affirming in the aggregate. Despite its scale, the internet can be a lonely place. Most creators create in a vacuum. ... Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet.
I think I'll try better to re-establish this habit.
There's non-destructive ways to do so; take a photo, post a review, write a blog post. Actually Facebook and Instagram are known platforms to "leave a trace" like that, its shady side aside.
But also, plenty of public places like museums, restaurants - at least where I live - have a "guest book" where you can leave a message. I like to believe other visitors and the staff have a leaf through those every once in a while.
I am one of those consumers of the internet, who believes in adding minimal noise. But I see the point being made in the post, and here I am, leaving a trace.
If the page had a comment box, would have done it there.
Surprisingly, it just makes me feel more invested in the topic than I would have been otherwise and frankly not worth the time.
Also, not surprisingly, I am evaluating whether my comment added any value and I think it just added to the noise.
Years ago I was stuck on a tricky JS bug, I Googled it and ended up on a decent answer on StackOverflow. I implemented it, and it worked! I went back to SO and upvoted the answer, and it said "You can't upvote your own answer" Huh!??? Yes, it was my own answer from years back. Thanks, me!
Leaving a trace is something I've been grappling with which seemed incredibly straight forward initially as an open source developer.
These days, I find myself questioning for whom am I leaving a trace for? What kinds of humans or entities? Do I care about the kinds of entities who will inhabit the future? Or will their value system be so different to my own that I'd prefer not to have anything to do with them.
Beyond human nature itself, I take issue with the trend of how human nature seems to be changing over time; for the worse.
I actually use this line of reasoning to motivate and inspire some of my own art and cultural artifacts. When a far future galactic civilization pauses to ask, “who are we and where did we come from“, they might just look back at the ledger of humanity’s written outputs. In this sense, the entire trace we manage to save to disk could be viewed as a body of work were any of it to survive. Even pieces of work that nobody reads today could have a long line of future audiences and help shape the galaxy’s understanding of its cultural heritage. (These future entities might have far more processing power and bandwidth to spend on the analysis of our work).
To me, true altruism is selfish. If helping people makes you feel good, then you're an altruist.
If helping others doesn't make you feel good innately but you do it all for others then I think there is some self-deception at play. Maybe it's a status or self-image thing? Because being an altruist is good and you want to see yourself as good? I think you can always trace it back to a selfish motive at some level.
Denying the selfish root of altruism can lead to hypocrisy because there is a dissonance between who the individual really is in their natural state and who they want to believe themselves to be.
> I find myself questioning for whom am I leaving a trace for? What kinds of humans or entities?
How's your reasoning there? You only want to be nice to people who have earned it? This sounds a bit too close to the "you have to EARN my respect", which is a hallmark of somebody nobody wants to be around.
You can only control your own actions. If your "good deeds" are conditional or transactional, then that very much diminishes their goodness.
You're right. I have certain values and I'm OK if others expect certain values from me. To me this is ideal. Friendships should not be based on superficial things like money or social status to the point that you have to constantly change yourself over time to maintain alignment.
If you pay attention, you will notice that this is how the vast majority of people operate.
To me, that's transactional. Having fixed core values and expecting other people to share certain core values is not transactional, it's genuine. These are the kinds of relationships which don't require constant maintenance; you can not talk with the person for years and then resume the friendship like no time has passed, no matter how your situations have changed. If you can change your values based on the latest social trends, then you have no values. The friendship is held together by mutual material benefits; that's transactional.
I have no genuine interest in being friends with people who don't have core values. Because then I'd know I'm only in it for the money, and that's a lot of work and stress for me. Maybe second nature to some people. But I'm no good actor. To me it's work.
My view of humanity is most people are actors and most people lie to themselves constantly.
Similar idea: don't go through life anonymously.
Go to your professor's office hours, learn the names of your neighbors, become a regular at the local sandwich shop and shoot the breeze with staff, ask the people you're waiting in line alongside if they have any good jokes.
Don't be fooled that social media and conspicuous consumption are the best paths to community.
If you're going to strike up conversation with strangers, it's best if you make it easy for them. If you're asking for a joke, you're making it easy on yourself and setting a bar for them. I'm a jokester but I don't have a good repertoire of jokes on hand -- I respond to banter. So if you ask me if I have a joke, I often just sputter and throw out the last bad pun somebody shared with me.
Make a joke yourself, if you're feeling funny. But be warned... a stranger once asked me why I was going on a trip. I was visiting my dad who was presently in surgery for cancer that would go on to end his life. I was too emotional to answer with anything but the truth. I certainly wasn't going to respond well to humor.
That all sounds exhausting (introvert here).
The last thing I want to do when out in public is be stuck talking with strangers.
As an introvert, one thing that works is that I repeatedly go to the same shops and restaurants so people know me and I know them, and we’re not strangers anymore.
The price of community is inconvenience
As a fellow introvert, I would recommend that you see it as taking medication. Or getting exercise.
You don't do it because you like it. You do it because if you don't, then you'll be worse off years later.
This is something I've definitely lived by for many years. Nearly all of my colleagues and friends don't believe me when I say I'm an introvert. I purposely put the effort in to make meaningful connections with anyone I can and it has paid off more times than I could ever count. Is it exhausting? Absolutely. But in my mind, the alternative is worse. People are great. Get to know them.
> You do it because if you don't, then you'll be worse off years later.
This feels hyperbolic. While I would agree that community and remaining connected are very important to overall health, I don’t feel like making a habit of talking to strangers is a prerequisite.
> ask the people you're waiting in line alongside if they have any good jokes.
I know no one who tries striking up a conversation with strangers, and I feel like the majority of strangers would be annoyed/uncomfortable with this.
I feel the same.
Sometimes, I work against this and start conversations.
Rarely people are annoyed. Too often, they seem happy someone breaks their shell, they just don't want to be that person who takes the first step.
Every time I see a new person I still feel the same.
Somehow everyone gets friends - which means at some point in life everyone did talk to a stranger.
> As a writer, receiving feedback on my work is welcome and rare. This blog gets thousands of readers a month, and yet the amount of direct feedback I’ve received over all the years is a small fraction of that.
If you don’t have any comment box it’s hard to give you any feedback.
It can be worse: on a recent post here[0] the author says the contact page on his blog "does nothing but wastes spammers time and effort"[1]. Granted, he links to an email on said page, but why include a fake contact form[2] on your page then?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48508069
[1] https://bruceediger.com/posts/honeypot-design/
[2] https://bruceediger.com/contact/
What is the ideal approach for one? Assuming you don't want it to be a public one (to avoid moderation headaches), and you want to avoid automated spam, and your page is a static site, what is the ideal way to incorporate something like that?
Maybe giscus
https://giscus.app/
It works for static sites, you just need to embed their script, and spam and moderation would be handled by GitHub.
I have a static blog with a public comments system using Disqus; it’s just a JS snippet and it works great. I’ve seen people (ab)using GitHub issues too, or even use gists for blog posts.
Shaming people for not leaving comments anyway, I infer. /s
I put my email address on these things. All spammers already have it anyway. I get some feedback.
Or a normal web form with a captcha will create minimal spam. Certainly sufficient for someone not famous.
Or you can have a google form. Either with or without google verifying the senders email address.
You're not kidding. There's neither comment box nor email address. Is he expecting us to cyberstalk him to find if someone has doxxed him, just to give a thumbs up?
"Why is nobody calling to invite me to parties", says man who unplugged his phone.
Edit: Ok, I'm old. For younger people, pretend I said "turned off his phone".
There is a contact form on the Consulting / Hire Me page, but it takes a little poking around to find it.
Yeah. Should we just magically infer that he likes getting non-gig contacts on his explicitly gig contact form? The form is under "Get in Touch", and under an offer for a 15 minute call. I don't want that.
This reminds me of a friend of mine who in a B2B setting contacted a potential vendor by filling in a form, with his email and phone number as contact details. Instead of emailing or calling back, this vendor continued the conversation by tracking down my friend on LinkedIn and messaging him there! They already had the email and phone number from their form.
I'm also not super impressed by the consulting gig's "Johnny Holton" reference talking about Jake's "engineering excellence". A google search says Johnny Holton is an American hand egg player.
If I were a potential client going in cold then this would not fill me with confidence in his attention to detail.
Few weeks ago someone here (let's call him $user) commented here that articles that would most benefited from picture often don't have one, to which someone replied calling it "$user's law", I wanted to comment how spot on the $user was but ultimately didn't and instead just upvoted. I was just about to complain here how I wish I commented so that could find it again, but then I thought, wait a minute, maybe hn tracks upvotes too, and sure enough it does, I was able to find the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001607
> The more an article would benefit from photos, the less likely it’ll have them.
-- Waterluvian's Law
In contrast: A few years ago I was hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). One of the few rules to follow there is to explicitly leave no trace, in respect to nature and others.
People go to nature to interact with nature, not with traces of other human beings. You don't want to ride 4 hours to countryside only to find very same things you've been running away from.
In contrast, people go to blogs to find opinions, and traces of opinions of others are usually adding, not subtracting. One can say whole HN is a sandbox for sharing opinions, therefore "untouched" posts with no comments and low points are less attractive.
The common saying is 'Take only photographs, leave only footprints.'
For me it is more like, i should have started leaving a trace before the invention of modern genAI, now maybe is late. I could have had a trusted trace to prove that I am a genuine human, now I get the impression that faceless new accounts/profiles or whatever are all fake and automatically managed.
It's never too late; the important part is to have a personality and your own opinions. AI is agreeable, they will just go along with whatever information they are prompted with, unless they get an explicit prompt to be disagreeable. But you as a human have morals, values, experience and knowledge that you can apply to e.g. leaving comments or writing things.
But this was good advice years ago too. The average Facebook or Youtube comment section feels like it's full of empty drones, repeated and predictable comments that don't actually add much. HN comments are a breath of fresh air in that regard. Reddit can be to some degree, as long as you filter out the predictable kneejerk reactions and "I also choose this guy's dead wife" meme comments.
You were probably thinking about geeks leaving heartwarming comments under a forgotten repository while reading this.
But what really makes a trace valuable? Internet growth has proven that scaling traces does not really grow value to the same extent.
At this exact moment in time there are literal thousands of creators that chase external validation, and millions of lurkers leaving 1-bit "like" reactions under their content. Let's go to popular instagram pages in a search of humanity. Billions of reactions left on social media so far proved to be very poor indication of quality. In a world of content abundance one rarely has time or motivation to re-visit everything he/she reacted upon. This also works increasingly worse the more "traces" you leave, see #1 and #2.The "traces" I love most is people who post complicated enough issues on github repos that show the depth of their use case.
Where there's some detail that's causing them problems, and they would not hit it unless they were actually making use of the project in a productive way. It's sort of the ultimate proof of the work I did being useful for somebody and a genuine motivator to resolve that issue for them too.
Thanks for the article Jake. It tried twice to subscribe to your newsletter but the page stalled.
> Tell them it didn’t work and why.
I did that, once, and got an expletive-filled rant about ungrateful, entitled shits (meaning Yours Troolie), in response.
These days, I just quietly slip out the back, and close the door behind me.
Ignoring the ironically missing way to respond to the post beyond the consult page, this is something I used to reliably do, for exactly this reason:
> First, it’s positive and affirming in the aggregate. Despite its scale, the internet can be a lonely place. Most creators create in a vacuum. ... Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet.
I think I'll try better to re-establish this habit.
You can leave traces in the physical world too, although it's often looked down on as vandalism.
There's non-destructive ways to do so; take a photo, post a review, write a blog post. Actually Facebook and Instagram are known platforms to "leave a trace" like that, its shady side aside.
But also, plenty of public places like museums, restaurants - at least where I live - have a "guest book" where you can leave a message. I like to believe other visitors and the staff have a leaf through those every once in a while.
A teacher told us that if we ever jump off a building, we should make sure to land teeth-first so that we leave an impression.
I am one of those consumers of the internet, who believes in adding minimal noise. But I see the point being made in the post, and here I am, leaving a trace.
If the page had a comment box, would have done it there.
And, how does that make you feel?
Surprisingly, it just makes me feel more invested in the topic than I would have been otherwise and frankly not worth the time. Also, not surprisingly, I am evaluating whether my comment added any value and I think it just added to the noise.
Gave up waiting after 30s of clustering
I think this is pragmatic and useful advice. Often it also helps you work through what you think by writing it down. Left this comment as a trace.
Years ago I was stuck on a tricky JS bug, I Googled it and ended up on a decent answer on StackOverflow. I implemented it, and it worked! I went back to SO and upvoted the answer, and it said "You can't upvote your own answer" Huh!??? Yes, it was my own answer from years back. Thanks, me!
Glad I left a trace.
Nice try NSA.
If you really want feedback, make sure you leave something needing correction.
"A stranger is wrong on the internet!" xkcd#386
Leaving a trace is something I've been grappling with which seemed incredibly straight forward initially as an open source developer.
These days, I find myself questioning for whom am I leaving a trace for? What kinds of humans or entities? Do I care about the kinds of entities who will inhabit the future? Or will their value system be so different to my own that I'd prefer not to have anything to do with them.
Beyond human nature itself, I take issue with the trend of how human nature seems to be changing over time; for the worse.
I actually use this line of reasoning to motivate and inspire some of my own art and cultural artifacts. When a far future galactic civilization pauses to ask, “who are we and where did we come from“, they might just look back at the ledger of humanity’s written outputs. In this sense, the entire trace we manage to save to disk could be viewed as a body of work were any of it to survive. Even pieces of work that nobody reads today could have a long line of future audiences and help shape the galaxy’s understanding of its cultural heritage. (These future entities might have far more processing power and bandwidth to spend on the analysis of our work).
In the context the article intends, the trace isn't really for you, it's for the people you interact with
I don't believe in that definition of altruism.
To me, true altruism is selfish. If helping people makes you feel good, then you're an altruist.
If helping others doesn't make you feel good innately but you do it all for others then I think there is some self-deception at play. Maybe it's a status or self-image thing? Because being an altruist is good and you want to see yourself as good? I think you can always trace it back to a selfish motive at some level.
Denying the selfish root of altruism can lead to hypocrisy because there is a dissonance between who the individual really is in their natural state and who they want to believe themselves to be.
> I find myself questioning for whom am I leaving a trace for? What kinds of humans or entities?
How's your reasoning there? You only want to be nice to people who have earned it? This sounds a bit too close to the "you have to EARN my respect", which is a hallmark of somebody nobody wants to be around.
You can only control your own actions. If your "good deeds" are conditional or transactional, then that very much diminishes their goodness.
You're right. I have certain values and I'm OK if others expect certain values from me. To me this is ideal. Friendships should not be based on superficial things like money or social status to the point that you have to constantly change yourself over time to maintain alignment.
If you pay attention, you will notice that this is how the vast majority of people operate.
To me, that's transactional. Having fixed core values and expecting other people to share certain core values is not transactional, it's genuine. These are the kinds of relationships which don't require constant maintenance; you can not talk with the person for years and then resume the friendship like no time has passed, no matter how your situations have changed. If you can change your values based on the latest social trends, then you have no values. The friendship is held together by mutual material benefits; that's transactional.
I have no genuine interest in being friends with people who don't have core values. Because then I'd know I'm only in it for the money, and that's a lot of work and stress for me. Maybe second nature to some people. But I'm no good actor. To me it's work.
My view of humanity is most people are actors and most people lie to themselves constantly.
Great post!