> ShowHN posts almost never make the front page (<2%)
Based on other details of analysis, I believe this means 2% of front pages posts are ShowHN. Not that 98% of ShowHN posts fail to reach front page. But the author doubles down on this confusion with flawed methodology:
> Second, and perhaps more importantly, the dataset doesn’t record the attempts made to get to the front page, i.e. all posts on Hacker News in a given day. It’s possible that there are orders of magnitude more blog posts posted but fewer that make the FP, whereas 95% of any academic paper submitted makes the front page (extreme figures used for illustrative purposes). So for simplicity, I’ll say “the likelihood of making the FP” which assumes a constant rate of conversion from post to FP across different categories.
and also doubles down on the logical fallacy in their conclusion:
> ShowHN is very valuable, but is not likely to land your product on the front page.
For curiosity's sake I wanted to estimate the probability of getting to the front page with a show hn. The easy but terrible way is to just look at a few new show hn from yesterday and look at how many got more than 50 points.
The answer ~4% (3/79). Please expect gigantic error bars.
This is the analysis I wanted to do, but for the entire group of categories would have been time prohibitive (it's easy for ShowHN because that is filterable). Interesting results here
This is a good rundown but misses the biggest thing, random chance.
Depending on time of day the your post will stay on page one of "new" for between 20-40 minutes. It needs about 4-6 upvotes in that time to drop onto the bottom of the homepage, and then with that a chance of more eyeballs. Some people skim page two and look for thing with a couple of votes for closer inspection, but the reality is you have that brief moment to catch attention of people who are interested in your topic.
The more high profile the item you're posting is the more likely it will catch the attention of people who are interested in the short window. More obscure topics are obviously harder to catch those initial votes.
The new page is very busy at some particular times of day. It can be a good idea to post more obscure topics in a "down time" period.
2-6pm UTC is by far the busiest time, you often see corporate posts aiming to land in new during this time, even to the point of scheduling their blog posts for this window. The payoff in traffic is worth the chance of a very brief period on page one of new.
The other thing to note is that HN is a different place at the weekend, interesting long reads do well then along with somewhat fun and silly side projects.
Also consider "Show HN" posts, they have a different ranking "gravity" and can be easer to get into the homepage, but don't necessarily stay there or as high for as long. If you are launching something, this is your best bet. They also hang around on the "show" page for days with a log tail of traffic.
Finally there is the "second chance pool" [0], I don't know the details of who or how, but some posts are flagged to be given a second chance on the bottom of the homepage. Sometimes hours or days later. A surprising proportion of top of homepage posts come from that pool - good things have a high chance of entering it.
Best advise, write what you're interested in and keep posting.
The second chance pool is a pretty good example of just how mercilessly random getting on the front page is. Lots of cool and interesting stuff just slips by and gets drowned out the first time it's submitted.
I had a blog post last year that made it to the top of HN thanks to the second chance pool.
I submitted the post to HN on a Saturday and it got I think two upvotes before slipping off of "new" and I figured that was the end of that. But to my surprise I happened to check HN Sunday evening and found that it was near the top. I had no idea that something like that was possible.
Exactly! There is no link on the main hn page to this pool, how are we supposed to visit there? And if nobody visits, what's even the use of having this pool!
Who knows what other hidden nuggets these chosen few Illuminati are hiding!
> There is no link on the main hn page to this pool
In fact, there is one! But it is somehow, hidden. In the front page scroll to the bottom and you will find some footnotes in the form of links, click the “lists” item and it will take you to another page, choose the second item “pool” and you are there!
As I understand it the way it works is that items from the pool are randomly put on the front page for some fraction of users so you don't have to directly visit the pool page.
That's not how it works exactly. It's just that this pool page is a list of all the pages that have been submitted back to the second chance pool by the mods.
HN post titles have to (mostly) match the title of the page/article. Think carefully how you title your posts so that they are descriptive enough about the post. Short titles, like "why we are awesome", with no lead or indication of topic do very badly.
For GitHub repositories, include a description of the tool along with the name of it in the readme title.
Interesting. But I believe you're be wrong about Show HN (as others have pointed out).
Show HN makes for an effective way to get to the front page, based on three reasons:
1. You don't need that many votes to make it to the front page, and the votes don't need to happen in the first minutes after you've posted.
2. Many people use shownew[1] in addition to newest[2] to discover content on HN.
3. Show HN posts remain visible for a longer time on shownew compared to regular posts on newest.
When you post using Show HN, your post stays for a long time in shownew (right now the last one there was posted 19 hours ago), while on newest your post has to gather votes very quickly to make it to the front page (the last post visible there is from ~50 minutes ago). So Show HN gives you a higher chance of getting your post "discovered".
In my case, I've made it to the front page 4 times out of 21 posts. 3 of those were Show HN posts.
If this is a marketer trying to figure out how to get a product launch to the front page, there are a few errors in their thinking:
1) Show HN is the right answer. End of story. That is how we specifically say to HN, "Look at this thing I made!", regardless of whether you are an established user or new to the site. Just do that.
2) Their goal isn't actually to get "to the front page". Their goal is to get eyes on their work. See #1.
3) Unless their target market is actually the HN crowd... why are they wanting our eyes, anyway?
and it is a much more certain thing. I have a (i) a model that predicts "will this headline get more than 10 votes?" and (ii) one that predicts "if this headline gets more than 10 votes does it get a ratio of comments to votes greater than the median (roughly 0.5)?"
The best model I have for (i) is still a bag of words model that doesn't try to correct for time series variations, the AuC is atrocious, maybe around 65%, but I like the model because high-scoring headlines look like a parody of high-scoring headlines, I think "Richard Stallman has died" could be the best possible headline. (It's silly to thing you could get good performance at this because it can't see if the article has a flashy picture or other attractive attributes that would raise the vote rate.) I've made other models with fancier methods but none perform better nor are more entertaining.
As for (ii) the most commented articles tend to be clickbaity so it would be irresponsible to submit a feed of high scoring articles that isn't well curated. I am getting an AuC of around 72% which is what I got with my first recommender.
This article breaks it down by category. But that doesn't really say much. Its about content.
For example a blog post by Linus Torvalds has a better chance than a blog post by me. (I don't think he has a blog - but we've see some salty commit messages etc by him).
Similarly, if its an academic paper titled "P = NP proven" it will probably shoot to the font page.
Companies that just want their stuff to be on the front page need to make more interesting stuff.
I am 99% certain by now, after a decade plus observing it that if one submits a URL one gets into a very competitive race with folks using voting rings or otherwise paid/inauthentic upvoting services.
8 of my last 10 blog posts[1] made the front page of HN. Before that, my posts only made the front page infrequently. What changed is I started picking topics and framings which are more appealing to HN readers, and I credit Michael Lynch's course[2] for helping me to do that. He is surely one of the best authorities on what reaches the front page of HN.
> In my job as technical writer / marketer1, the most common question I get from companies I work with is “how do we get to the front page of Hacker News?”
Genuinely surprising. Does everyone read HN but just never mentions it?
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> And of those product announcements that made the FP, a good deal of them are (a) from established companies and products like Apple,
I've often observed this and found these two at odds. HN often turns into a promotional mouthpiece with pieces that are distinctly incurious.
I have a fair amount of experience getting things to the front page of Hacker News because I sometimes share work from Hack Club (https://hackclub.com), a coding nonprofit I work for.
By far, beyond any tricks or special hacks, the most effective mechanism is just posting things people on HN will genuinely find interesting. And that’s the beauty of this place!
Hi, I am collecting links from various places. Even from Hacker news. I have links since start of the year [1]. Maybe someone will find them useful. You should look at files named like [2].
I was tempted to answer the title with "domainname checks out", but that wouldn't do hackernews any justice.
Although imho it seems really random what makes it to the frontpage i agree that there is always an interesting mix of blog posts, news articles and technical content.
Maybe it also depends on the time of the day (different audiences active, having a slightly different taste)?
My anecdotal experience agrees that blog posts with promotions are better than "here's my product" , on average. Though you can just do both.
I've front paged Hacker News a few times and I've recently had a lot of success promoting a product on Reddit.
Often times I see boostrappers hype up Twitter as a marketing channel and lament that Reddit / Hacker News is impossible since it's a lottery to get upvotes, mods take stuff down, and users are hostile to promotion. While there's some truth to that, I think these people don't "get" these upvote platforms.
If you drive-by and drop off a link to a product, it'll probably get lost. If you write something really interesting then leave a promotional message at the end, it'll probably work fine. On sites like Reddit specifically, it's better to put more content in the post rather than link out (sucks for your site's SEO but much more likely to get upvoted).
There's definitely some luck to Hacker News but cream also does tend to rise to the top and you're allowed to re-submit.
It's annoying that there's a subset of HN and Reddit that think that anyone trying to make a dime on the internet is somehow sub-human, but they are a minority . I followed my strategy with a a Reddit post recently and the person complaining about my promotion of a paid product at the end got 13 downvotes ( https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/13wt05l/lsg_hanks_ri... ) . Because people liked the content so will forgive a promotion if there's some value add.
Ultimately people value being entertained and value learning useful information. So if you can do one of those two things, they will probably forgive a product shoutout.
Funny thing is I really struggle with Twitter and have the "tweeting into a void" problem but Reddit / HN seem to come more naturally to me. Though I'm guessing the secret is another variation of "be more entertaining or more informative".
But you can also try different stuff, you can do a Show HN and a blog post.
There's one last really important thing I don't see mention on Max Woolf's Hacker News undocumented. If you submit your own blog too many times without enough upvotes, you will get auto-flagged. So make sure you submit some random other stuff you find interesting to please the algorithm gods. But that goes back to "act like a regular member of the community and the community will forgive some self-promotion".
Or better still be a regular member of the community. Nothing raises my hackles like something posted and commented on by a group who have hardly a karma point between them.
> Statistically, your best shot of getting your writing to the front page of Hacker News is by writing something (with nothing to promote) on your personal website or blog.
I’ve thought about starting a blog. I’m curious if you noticed what the most popular blogging sites were while gathering your statistics?
Admist all the discussion here about faulty methodology and conclusions, how about we stop upvoting this (and similar content) to help out the front page quality and maybe give some more of those Show HN's a chance
Based on other details of analysis, I believe this means 2% of front pages posts are ShowHN. Not that 98% of ShowHN posts fail to reach front page. But the author doubles down on this confusion with flawed methodology:
> Second, and perhaps more importantly, the dataset doesn’t record the attempts made to get to the front page, i.e. all posts on Hacker News in a given day. It’s possible that there are orders of magnitude more blog posts posted but fewer that make the FP, whereas 95% of any academic paper submitted makes the front page (extreme figures used for illustrative purposes). So for simplicity, I’ll say “the likelihood of making the FP” which assumes a constant rate of conversion from post to FP across different categories.
and also doubles down on the logical fallacy in their conclusion:
> ShowHN is very valuable, but is not likely to land your product on the front page.