Ask HN: What should a newcomer know to get started on Hacker News?"

* Leave meaningful comments that contribute to or prompt discussion.

* Links should be of technical interest to the community at large although politics will sneak in from time to time.

* Assume most everyone here is smarter than you or has good info to contribute. Get in the student mindset, open to learn while you interact, then engage.

* The voting system is not an "agree/disagree" button. Vote up thoughtful and informative, discussion-worthy contributions, vote down personal attacks or inflammatory stuff. It is also not necessary to vote on every comment or post you read, or at all. It's just a way for the community to collectively encourage better engagement.

* dang is busy, so just be good

Try to avoid jokes and very short comments. Neither are forbidden, but it's hard to know when you can use them, so avoid them for now.

Everyone is an expert in some topics. Try to find post that discuss those topics and reply the interesting questions.

From the Welcome page:

> The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial.

Try to get as much karma as possible ASAP so you can down vote things and comments you don't like

/Sarcasm

Have you already visited https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ?

Be careful and remember the demographics if you want points. If you automatically fit in, you won't have friction, but if you don't match the demographics you may find yourself happier elsewhere.

* High quality comments tend to populate in high quality subjects. Anything related to social commentary/policy, mental health, general statistics, psychology, and such tend to produce very low quality comments. Some subjects really demonstrate Dunning-Kruger effect. For example there is a lot of passion around privacy and most of that passion, in the comments, seems to come from people most ignorant about privacy related policy/laws.

* When you read enough on here, given the size of population and rate of activity, you will notice shifts in behavior with regard to the trendiness of a subject.

* Don’t be afraid to be disagreeable so long as that disagreeability is limited to the subject of discussion and not the people discussing. Diverse opinions appear extremely welcome in high quality subjects but are shunned in low quality discussions that attract cult like followers, such as Julian Assange discussions.

* Be aware that not everybody will share your level of education and worldly experience. Comments/replies to that effect sometimes surprise me both positively and negatively.

Stay away now while you still can or you'll get hooked.