[HN Gopher] What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
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What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
Author : mikpanko
Score : 109 points
Date : 2023-07-04 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (randomshit.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (randomshit.dev)
| reaperman wrote:
| > _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._
| sxg wrote:
| Exactly. This is an analysis of what the front page is composed
| of rather than what gets to the front page.
| acover wrote:
| 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.
|
| Links checked:
|
| 2/30 from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew?next=36572237&n=61
|
| 1/30 from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew?next=36564410&n=91
|
| 0/19 from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew?next=36556170&n=121
| Aachen wrote:
| #3 currently has 25 points, #8 has 14, and #12 has 9 points.
| Not sure that 50 points is a good measure of whether it has
| been on the front page.
|
| What does that mean anyway, does being on #25 for three
| minutes count?
| acover wrote:
| You are right "on the front page" is not a good question.
| The question I wanted to answer is "succeeded in getting
| significant attention".
|
| 50 votes is arbitrary but represents about 5000 views and
| often means there was some discussion.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| So typically, 1% of readers will vote on a post?
|
| It would not surprise me. I occasionally vote on
| comments, but almost never vote on posts.
| acover wrote:
| It's just a rule of thumb and varies alot between
| communities.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1fd2tu/d
| ata...
| ape4 wrote:
| 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.
| matricaria wrote:
| Apparently writing about it will get you there.
| folex wrote:
| I like that the URL is basically the answer to the question.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I have not cracked the code yet.
|
| 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.
|
| Luck of the lightning bolt may be a factor too.
| [deleted]
| LovinFossilFuel wrote:
| Content that is personally placed there by front tech socialist
| dang.
| irrational wrote:
| > 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?
| samwillis wrote:
| 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.
|
| 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
| eatonphil wrote:
| Wow, while I knew about the pool, I didn't know there was a
| page that actually showed it.
| josters wrote:
| On that note, here[1] is a resource with some more
| undocumented HN features.
|
| [1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
| pyeri wrote:
| 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!
| antognini wrote:
| 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.
| eatonphil wrote:
| 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.
| morkalork wrote:
| 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.
| antognini wrote:
| 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.
| linux2647 wrote:
| Case in point: TFA was submitted five days ago[0] and barely
| got any upvotes. Now this second submission has over 100
| upvotes and made the front page
|
| [0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Frandomshit.dev%2
| Fpos...
| samwillis wrote:
| Oh, thought of another important one to add.
|
| 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.
|
| _Your page title is your HN post title._
| Y_Y wrote:
| Sex, drugs, rock-'n'-roll, lisp, rust, pg, homogeny, scq123,
| madness, bliss, short shorts.
| alexwasserman wrote:
| Now I'm curious about the ratio of RSS to front-page readers.
|
| I only read HN (and all "news" content) through NNW or Feedly, so
| I get strict published order.
|
| This means there are plenty of article I wish weren't flagged off
| HN, and plenty with no comments I wish had commentary.
|
| But, overall, I see what's probably more genetically
| representative of posts, not the hive mind.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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
| politelemon wrote:
| > 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.
| e-dant wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know how my filesystem watcher made it to the front
| page either
| djbusby wrote:
| I've got all of HN in SQLite if anyone else wants to play. You'd
| wanna hydrate into something better.
|
| Share on Torrent maybe? Like 640MiB per year.
| u_name wrote:
| 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)?
| post-it wrote:
| > 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?
| zachlatta wrote:
| 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!
| jbs55 wrote:
| " A blog post from a corporate entity only has a 8% shot at
| making the FP"
|
| This is not the same as saying 8% of the FP is corp blog posts
|
| Actually stopped reading at this point
|
| Also first post
| codingdave wrote:
| 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?
| neilv wrote:
| > _3) Unless their target market is actually the HN crowd...
| why are they wanting our eyes, anyway?_
|
| I was wondering that, too. Investors? Hiring?
| agwa wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=agwa.name
|
| [2] https://hitthefrontpage.com/
| amelius wrote:
| SEO -> HNO
| waprin wrote:
| 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".
| beardyw wrote:
| 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.
| dylanjcastillo wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
| golergka wrote:
| > What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
|
| > (randomshit.dev)
|
| Well. I think the title almost answers itself.
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(page generated 2023-07-04 23:01 UTC)