Leave a Trace

hk__2

> 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.

dabedee

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.

Retr0id

You can leave traces in the physical world too, although it's often looked down on as vandalism.

S7012MY

Great post!

quaunaut

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.

bohrar

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.

suncemoje

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.

logged4upvoting

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.

jongjong

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.

mulhoon

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.

randusername

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.

gravel7623

Nice try NSA.

smugglerFlynn

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.

password4321

If you really want feedback, make sure you leave something needing correction. "A stranger is wrong on the internet!" xkcd#386

ChrisMarshallNY

> 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.

bcjdjsndon

Gave up waiting after 30s of clustering

dvh

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

ajpaulson

Thanks for the article Jake. It tried twice to subscribe to your newsletter but the page stalled.

1970-01-01

I've found the web is full of these little traces: https://xkcd.com/979/

jbranchaud

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. https://still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks