HACKER Q&A
📣 ColinWright

Do You “Fire and Forget”?


I look at the "newest" page every day at unpredictable times, and reasonably often I see something that has a minor error that's easily fixable, or make a comment that I hope would enable the poster/author to enhance the item in some way.

Almost (but not quite always) invariably my comment goes unanswered, leading me to believe that either:

(a) my input is not as helpful as it is intended to be, or

(b) the poster/author isn't watching the submission.

There may be other options, but I'm wondering ... how many people here operate in "fire and forget" mode? The evidence suggests the proportion is substantial.

Another option is that those who are not in "F&F" mode fix things and I don't see the erroneous version, so there is some selection bias, but even so, I'm curious.

  👤 onecommentman Accepted Answer ✓
That’s a good question. I think the comment making the correction is adequate, since this isn’t a “carved in stone” sort of media and those interested read the comments as well.

I’ll have something more to say about this when I finish my experiment here in “elder delurking”. One point that has come up is it is much more pleasant for the elderly to “fire and forget”, though this is more relevant for a posted comment than an original post. Little upside potential (who wants to be an 80 y.o. Influencer, nobody that old is interested in managing an online persona), and major downsides (you are all punk kids to us, even if you’re 50) to pursue a different strategy.

👤 rachelbythebay
There's a lot of cruft on /new which I'm sure either has no humans behind it... or has someone doing nothing BUT spamming their domain's links every day. They don't care and they don't engage.

Flag, flag, flag...