I hate this attitude, and it's prevalent all over HN. What makes you so special? Because you simply found this site before someone else?

I imagine there are plenty of brilliant and interesting people on the internet that are not aware of HN, but could contribute nicely if they became members here.

This "age elitism" issue is wearying. It happens in other places too (SomethingAwful, for example, went through a hilariously horrible period where the year you registered was the most important part of your post).

But this is supposedly an intellectual forum, not a comedy forum. Grow up and stop thinking the number of days since joining makes you better than someone else.

(Yes, I joined after you. I am also diluting this forum. Get off my lawn.)

I think age is the wrong metric, you're right registering before someone doesn't mean jack.

What does mean something is intent, and telling people how to exploit HN brings in people intending to ... exploit HN!

It's a shitty trend and it's why we get so much generic-startup-story garbage from startups who've decided to make us their studio audience.

When I first got here, people were complaining about the new guys. I only seem "old"-ish because I joined to make a comment like 3 (edit: actually 4, crikey) years ago and then didn't come back until this year.

My problem is not the new guy. It's that he says he found non-HN readers and, in so many words, said "fill up their page with stuff".

He didn't say "join HN and hang around for a while".

He said: "Get your page on the top of HN".

Those aren't the same things.

> He didn't say "join HN and hang around for a while".

> He said: "Get your page on the top of HN".

Fair enough, I see what you are saying. Sorry for the rant, it's early and the coffee is still settling in. =)

Perfectly understandable. In text I frequently convey an air of breathtaking arrogance (in person only occasionally so).

> Additionally I feel that HN has a good algorithm to stop most of the people who wouldn't be a good fit anyway.

> Posting a post on HN and then getting people to vote won't get you to the front page (and if it does, getting dropped off it is pretty easy if the content you posted is not relevant).

If there's too much spam, those brave netizens who patrol the windswept frontier of /newest don't get time to look at what is actually good.

They start upvoting on headlines.

> those brave netizens who patrol the windswept frontier of /newest

I don't know how they feel about it, but I sometimes feel that visiting /newest to vote / flag stuff is a kind of civic duty. For the good of all of us (except the ones who are dead).

Most of them will simply use Hacker News to find interesting content, not sure how that's diluting the site.

How are they going to get to the top of HN without posting their useless blogspam?

I believe a more appropriate question would be "How are they going to get to the top of HN posting their useless blogspam?"

Because the answer for your question is easy: Posting useful things.

And as far as I know, that's the only way to get enough upvotes to appear even on the first page.

Within the past few months, I've noticed a lot of things on the front page with 20+ points, no comments, and little value.

Judging by the comments at the bottom of this discussion, I think I see a growing trend.

Let's hope you are not right then, for our sake.