I remember reading a stat on reddit that 10% of users upvote and 1% of users comment. So if my memory is (near) accurate, that's very common behavior.

The 90-9-1 rule, which is common across many mass-participation media modalities, not just online.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=90-9-1_rule>

If you comment once on HN you are easily in the top 5% of users by comment count.

This thread made me finally make an account after at least 5+ years reading through the top 30 nearly everyday :)

Welcome

Yes, after a decade or so of following by E-Mail newsletter, I made an account. Long live to HN!

I'm at ~19 years - HN as daily home page since inception :)

Before HN, I used to hang out on Joel on Software and Eric's Business of Software forums; I occasionally used to post there and here but lost old accounts. If you have friends who have friends who has HN archeology skills and access, maybe I can recover my old account :)

We can try to dig up your old account if you want! You're welcome to email [email protected], or if you want to "do it live", post here and we can ask for the community's help if needed.

Thank you so much! Sent an email :)

Alas we didn't make it work. I was all ready to gloat over recovering your old account for you—probably got too confident about it. Hopefully some other information will resurface and we'll get it done another day.

Thank you for all your efforts and immediate attention, sorry that I couldn't make your job easier. What mattered the most was that I got a chance to have a brief chat with the actual human being behind the legendary HN username that makes everything run smoothly. Cheers, Daniel!

Needs more cocaine and angry jacket throwing, lol ;-)

Oh man I used to hang out on Joel on Software as well. Good times.

I have plenty of semi-technical friends that do this. Some of them only look at the links (e.g. via social media bots), and aren't even aware that HN has comments.

They're the kind of people who consider themselves "tech enthusiasts", they can install a nifty tool via pip if the instructions are clear enough, maybe even figure out what's wrong if there's an error, but they're definitely not programmers by any means.

Quite a few of them speak "tech English"; they can figure out a settings window or a signup form, they know enough tech vocabulary and basic grammar to mostly understand manuals, maybe with some help here or there, and can barely string an English sentence together. Ask them to define "lettuce" or "salmon" and they're lost.

Everyone is an expert in their own activity. If they have something insightful to say (or to ask) one trick is to write the comment in their native language and use autotranslation (double check technical words, because sometimes autotranslation picks the wrong synonym) (also check the output, because if the original has a one letter typo, sometimes it's translated to a very different word).

Another possibility is to write the comment in English inside gmail, and let suggestion gmail fix all the errors.

Probably. I created my account almost 13 years ago, but I read for years before creating it. I didn't create a reddit account until 2014, or a twitter account until 2015. I was reading Slashdot in the 90's though, to give you a sense of my age and how long I've been following stuff. I'm just a very late adopter...

Absolutely. Some of us see (or at least I see) the level of discussion and feel it would be hard for me to say something worthwhile that sounds kinda smart. So I mostly lurk while being grateful for those who do write incredibly insightful comments.

Very common. I was a daily reader of Slashdot for ten years without ever creating an account. Took me only five to create one for HN :)

You read raw Slashdot!? You must be a connoisseur of copypasta and frosty piss.

To me that's like 'I love doughnuts, I buy one every day, but the paper bag bits do get stuck in my teeth'.