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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.
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.
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.
"is be stuck talking with strangers."
Then learn not just how to start, but also how to end a conversation. I hated having to do small talk with people - until I learned that I had not to. I now can share something interesting - and then go back to minding my buisness. (If the other person is deaf on their end - strong signals to end a conversation are looking away, turning the body away, opening up ones laptop ... (or put out the damn phone) or put on earphones)
The price of community is inconvenience
> 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.
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.
This is great advice.
Although, the hardest part for me is the interaction with the neighbors, simply because it's not an easy relationship to sever if things go sideways. Still good to know the name of the crazy neighbor, I suppose.
> 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.
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".
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
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?
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.
There’s a 501(c)(3) dedicated to this too: https://lnt.org/
The common saying is 'Take only photographs, leave only footprints.'
I used to go hiking in New Mexico and I actually liked when I came across little signs that someone was there: a small stack of rocks, sticks arranged in a crop-circley pattern, a makeshift bridge over a small stream, etc.
But the worst part of hiking was seeing brightly-colored bags of dog shit right next to the trail, so I guess overall I’m ok with a general “leave no trace” rule. Then again, someone inconsiderate enough to do that wouldn’t care if there was a rule against it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
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?
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. > It helped you, so it’s likely a useful idea > You now have a profile you can access that collects the things you found noteworthyThe "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.
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
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.
i'll copy the comment i left there:
i find it hilarious how no one has "left a trace" in this post's comment section yet.
on the other hand, i think having to register an account on an unknown service (i don't know what will Discus do with my data) just to leave a comment is something the average reader (including myself) will not do; this being the exception, not the norm. in fact, i used a throwaway email for creating this account.
but i can also see how hard it would be to moderate an account-less comment section.
~~so, i will invite anyone who reads my comment to, instead of only replying here, forwarding any replies to any of my contact methods available on my website: https://jotalea.com.ar/~~ ignore this part, i do read HN often, so i will likely see the replies.
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).
> 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.
In the context the article intends, the trace isn't really for you, it's for the people you interact with
One way that I leave a trace, which is a practice I've adopted from Simon Willison, is to record blogmarks for interesting and useful things I come across. Sometimes I just leave a pull quote, but usually I try to add my own thoughts or make a connection to something else.
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.
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.
There was nowhere to comment.
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.
"You live only as long as the last person who remembers you" ~ Westworld
If you really want feedback, make sure you leave something needing correction.
"A stranger is wrong on the internet!" xkcd#386
Gave up waiting after 30s of clustering
I've found the web is full of these little traces:
https://xkcd.com/979/
Nice try NSA.
Great post!