HN is hard to game on purpose. So stop looking for the levers and participate, that's all there is to it. I've made friends here, have been helped by people on projects that I was busy with, did the reverse, found friends and business partners and spend way too much time. HN is a very interesting slice of the online world, a place that is unlike the rest, sometimes a bit dry but always interesting and extremely useful. If you're looking at it to try to understand it then you might as well try to understand a rat or a mouse. You won't understand it because it isn't there to be understood, it just is, like any other organism.
The root of HN is a thing called 'startup news', that was changed very quickly and since then HN has been a focal point for techies of all sorts but also lots of other people from all walks of life and from a large variety of countries. It isn't 'one thing' to everybody that participates, just like a hammer is a different thing for a carpenter than it is for a masoner or a farmer.
The fact that after being a member for a couple of years you have this question indicates a lack of participation, not a lack of understanding.
noosphr 1 hours ago [-]
Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.
Its also the currently last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.
You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.
yakbarber 46 seconds ago [-]
Reddit is significantly more popular/successful than HN even for tech.
HN is its own little world and that’s fine.
quietbritishjim 37 minutes ago [-]
> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.
Everything has a cost. For the web, that's typically monetary or your data and attention to advertisers. I think you're right that the cost of Hacker News is that my participation is lending some (tiny incremental) legitimacy to Y Combinator. It's also costing some tiny amount of my attention, in the sense that I may not have heard of Y Combinator if it weren't for Hacker News. For me personally, that is absolutely fine – but I'm glad you made it explicit so that it's a conscious choice.
[Edit: Of course it costs an absolutely vast amount of my attention :-) but I mean only a teeny tiny fraction of that is "payment" in the sense of noticing that Y Combinator exists.]
jacquesm 1 hours ago [-]
> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies.
That's up to you, really, you can just ignore them. I know I do.
> So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.
Probably, or maybe that is just an overly cynical take. If it were as bad as that I can think of a couple of very easy things they could do to improve on that and they aren't so for now I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Note that I'm not particularly impressed by anybody associated with YC except the mods here.
> Its also the last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.
So you're saying there is hope for Haskell?
> You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.
There are some pretty funny instances of such interaction here, the best of which still has me in stitches after more than a decade.
Gud 41 minutes ago [-]
What do you think is the purpose of news.YCOMBINATOR.com, if it’s not to promote(and make $$$$$) ycombinator?
I am not asking how you use it. I am asking what you believe is the reason the site operator is running it.
saaaaaam 15 minutes ago [-]
Not everything has to have an explicit purpose beyond “this is a good and valuable thing”.
Why do I take in parcels for my neighbour if a courier knocks on my door? She doesn’t pay me. It wouldn’t cause me any harm if I didn’t. But it makes the place nicer to live, and I’ve become friends with her as a result.
She invited me to dinner recently and fed me delicious food, and we drank very good champagne. That was an unexpected bonus.
“To promote ycombinator” only works if there’s an audience worth promoting to. Building something great that brings people back day after day maybe has the result that it can also serve as a promotional tool - but that’s a bonus, not necessarily a purpose.
I’m not the person you asked the question of - but I think the purpose of ycombinator is to give relevant people a place to discuss things aligned with the ecosystem in which ycombinator operates, to help strengthen and champion that ecosystem. Does it have a payoff for ycombinator? Almost certainly. Was it created with that explicit purpose in mind? I doubt it. There are easier ways to make money.
TomasBM 2 hours ago [-]
First two sentences are key. The reason why HN is so much better than other fora (IMO) is that the mods don't allow lever-pulling and astroturfing to overtake regular contributions. Yet it's also popular, so you're bound to get some activity on most posts.
Sure, it can be frustrating if you're trying to promote a product or farm karma on posts. But the fact that mostly nobody cares about karma means that you can post something and have it be evaluated on its technical, economic, social merits.
Obviously, there are caveats to this - i.e., anything US- and FAANG-related is bound to get much more activity than otherwise - but the overall atmosphere of HN is refreshing compared to Reddit.
nobodywillobsrv 1 hours ago [-]
How do you know they don't? How can you show this? It's fine if it's just vibes but just want to know what is known and can be said.
Spare_account 56 minutes ago [-]
The mods are active (and have even commented in this thread) and have a clearly stated set of objectives:
I can't know for sure. For me, it's just the "eyeball method" of comparing HN and different subreddits on Reddit.
As to how I (or anyone) could show this, here are a few example questions:
1. How many examples of stealthy but otherwise blatant promotion do you see in the comments? Not every astroturfing campaign will be successful or original, so you'd be able to notice some patterns. Plus, HN is already commercially oriented, and there's the "Show HN" option, so it reduces the incentives for astroturfing.
2. Alternatively, how much controversy is there around the specific type of forum? For some subreddits, for example, you'd be able to see counter-subreddits popping up when participants feel the mods are abusing their power to promote one type of opinion.
3. Is a certain type of political/brand-related opinion or interpretation always at the top of your comment feed? For example, if upvotes determine the order of the comments, do you consistently see fewer critical comments on things that you'd expect the community to react to in different ways.
4. Do you consistently see some contributors having more power in discussions over others? Other than the mods, obviously. If this is the case, karma (i.e., number of upvotes) often has more value.
Still, I could be wrong.
p-e-w 2 hours ago [-]
> HN is hard to game on purpose.
That’s a handwave trying to dismiss a host of valid concerns by lumping them together. It reads like “you probably want to game HN; stop doing so”.
Just a random issue that has been repeatedly brought up for at least a decade: HN is completely unusable for people with vision impairments relying on assistive technologies. It doesn’t use semantic HTML elements, it doesn’t use ARIA tags, its fonts and colors violate WCAG standards (which your browser’s dev tools will be happy to show you in detail), etc.
If the site is so blatantly unfriendly towards a significant minority of its potential users, apparently due to sheer negligence or “works for me” elitist attitude, I see no reason to believe that other aspects of the site are the way they are “on purpose”.
jacquesm 1 hours ago [-]
I think you're mixing a bunch of stuff here.
Accessibility is a problem and assuming it is as bad as you say it is it really should be addressed, agreed.
But that's completely orthogonal to being hard to game. And the concerns the OP brings up are unrelated to accessibility and indeed read more about instructions on how to game HN more successfully, otherwise why bring the VCs and the 'levers' into it in the first place?
nottorp 1 hours ago [-]
> It reads like “you probably want to game HN; stop doing so”.
YES.
> HN is completely unusable for people with vision impairments relying on assistive technologies.
For one, this is unrelated to allowing marketers to game the system.
For two, how much are you hyperbolizing there? I only ask because I was having a conversation in comments with a blind HN-er only like 3 days ago.
harvey9 43 minutes ago [-]
The small font and not working with Reader view is not ideal for me, but not such an issue as to force me to search for a solution.
nottorp 26 seconds ago [-]
Oh, small font. I forgot how small it is by default because the browser saves the zoom level per page.
Indeed, in spite of wearing glasses that correct me 100%, that font is way too small.
baq 1 hours ago [-]
Fighting spam is a benefit for everyone and it’s most definitely done on purpose behind closed doors.
Yes accessibility would be nice, I agree, but if I’m understaffed, provide free as in beer service where being on the first page is worth millions in marketing spend and being top 1 for a few hours is worth tens if not hundreds so I’m constantly under attack from everyone and their dog who have anything at all to sell, it’s going to be hard to prioritize other things.
…yeah I agree they should hire an intern or something to just fix this on slow burn.
jacquesm 1 hours ago [-]
HN is backed by very, very wealthy people, they could easily afford to fix this going on the assumption that it is as big a problem as the GP says, which I would rather ask the community than make any statements on.
baq 42 minutes ago [-]
I'm simply reminded of Tim Cook in 2014:
> Mr. Cook replied --with an uncharacteristic display of emotion--that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues. "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." It was the same thing for environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas that don’t have an immediate profit. The company does "a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it."
> Reportedly looking directly at the NCPPR representative, he said, "If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."
While there is a lack of semantic HTML, "completely unusable" is an inappropriate exaggregation. At least I am pretty happy that HN is one of the last places on the internet that still work pretty well with a text browser like Lynx. I wonder, do you rely on accessibility, or are you just parroting things you read elsewhere?
dang 5 hours ago [-]
(I'm a mod here)
It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks.
But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are links to past explanations about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
We try to elevate things that gratify curiosity: creative work, surprising discoveries, deep dives, technical achievements, unusual personal experience, whimsical unpredictability, good conversation, etc. And we try to demote things that run against curiosity, especially repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion.
It gets complicated because you'll also see plenty of repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion on HN—alas! This is the internet after all. But the site survives because the balance of these things stays within tolerable ranges, thanks to two factors: an active community which cares greatly about preserving this place for intended purpose (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html); and an owner (Y Combinator) which pays us to work on the site full time and mainly just wants us to keep it good, to the extent possible.
If you really want to figure this place out, the way to do it is as a reader. Hang out on the site, look at the mix of articles that make the frontpage, spend time in the discussion threads (hopefully the interesting sectors and not the flamey ones!), and over time your eyes will adjust.
What doesn't work—and this is good because we want it not to work—is approaching HN as a platform for promoting content. If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, but anyone) mainly care about "how can I use this thing to get attention for my startup/blog/project/newsletter", then you're operating in 'push' mode rather than 'pull' mode (or, even better, 'idle' mode). In that case you won't be curious because you're too focused on what you're wanting for extraneous reasons—and if you aren't in a state of curiosity, this place won't make sense. At least we hope it won't!
PaulRobinson 4 hours ago [-]
A great take, and thanks for your all hard work dang.
Yesterday the top comment on two stories I went to discuss had deep and meaningful content, before the last line which was a "and I talk about this stuff all the time on my newsletter [link]", and I was conflicted. Same poster each time.
The poster had done the HN thing: responded with thoughtful examination of TFA, unique and interesting insight, and I don't feel it was AI generated.
And then they marred it. They pushed something just slightly out of context. Not entirely, just a smidge.
I hope we can keep an eye on that sort of thing around here, it feels like it could slide into something...
matsemann 51 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, this "btw I have a newsletter here" seems overly promotional. HN as a forum doesn't have support for "signatures", then it feels a bit off to end every post with something not really relevant.
The grey area is people constantly linking to their own blog, but the linked post is relevant (example [0]). Like, it's good when people post relevant links to diver deeper, but when it's constantly your own content, that irks me a bit.
Not a mod, but I do hope you flag comments like that. Dang is awesome, but it is user moderation that makes a giant difference.
jacquesm 3 hours ago [-]
Done.
armchairhacker 1 hours ago [-]
I have a different take. If someone uses effort to post something genuinely interesting just so they can advertise their blog, good. You don't have to click the link, and it's better than nothing (assuming other comments here aren't as interesting).
Yes I agree with your comment, as you say I feel like the author of this post is trying to game the system for their "investors" and I do feel like it doesnt get into the ethos of hackernews
Purpose of hackernews as you said is fulfilling curiosity, its not a place where people should try to post to get eyeballs or something because their investors said so.
Honestly hackernews to me is a place where tinkering as a hobby is appreciated. I have read so many large threads here and ended up sometimes having a new point of view on something and so many posts here which make me want to be curious and tinker around too. I cannot really name something exactly which clicks on hackernews but that is what makes it unique and this does mean I cannot explain it to others sometimes since my hobbies are tangential to hackernews too, I just end up saying my hobby is tinkering with computers (currently only software)
robin_reala 1 hours ago [-]
Would you be open to making changes that improve the accessibility, without changing the fundamental setup of HN? I’m not proposing a redesign, but for example the textarea I’m typing in has no label (visible or invisible) and the table layout structure could be at least marked as presentational. Unfortunately, regardless of their curiosity, groups of people are finding it harder than necessary to gratify it at HN.
jannesblobel 3 hours ago [-]
Just by reading through all the comments and input under that post — “I know that I know nothing.” — Socrates
A lot of the comments and input here make sense. I’ll follow your advice and observe HN for a while, looking for interesting topics that suit me.
WalterBright 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you, dang. Your forum is the best one on the internet, and it's in no small part thanks to your moderation efforts.
jacquesm 1 hours ago [-]
I like that, this really is Dan's forum by now. Maybe YC should gift wrap it and make it a nice Christmas present.
ErroneousBosh 1 hours ago [-]
I was going to say, isn't "(I'm a mod here)" kind of an understatement? Oida, he has a pager for it.
3 hours ago [-]
jesusofsuburbia 58 minutes ago [-]
Honest question: was an LLM involved in writing this comment? The em-dash style stood out to me
dxdm 17 minutes ago [-]
> Honest question: was an LLM involved in writing this comment? The em-dash style stood out to me
The use of em dashes looks pretty natural to me. This is how they were used before LLMs, and what LLMs learned from.
Em dashes have a useful place in written language. I hope we will not lose their utility because people treat them as enough of a signal on their own to automatically question the authenticity of absolutely well-written pieces of text, without giving the matter any further consideration.
mithcs 2 hours ago [-]
dang, what a great answer.
StanislavPetrov 3 hours ago [-]
> If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, but anyone)
"The royal you"
Nevermark 1 hours ago [-]
Or the “you, the great unwashed”. Although there is no rule enforcing mutual exclusion.
fzeindl 4 hours ago [-]
Obviously all of what dang said, but I want to add that I think timing is an additional factor.
If you post when silicon valley wakes up on a weekday, you might get “initial” points faster, which leads to your submission being ranked higher up for a while and being more discoverable.
Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting stuff but we should keep these secrets otherwise people will try to game this system :)
Kaibeezy 2 hours ago [-]
That (\/) (;,,;) (\/) I’m helping! feeling upon discovering a mod has bumped one of your 04:00 UTC “oh, this is interesting” posts that nobody else saw.
MathiasPius 2 hours ago [-]
It sometimes blows my mind how questions which essentially boil down to "How do I best manipulate you for personal gain?" can be asked in such an unabashed fashion.
nacozarina 53 minutes ago [-]
Hello, fellow nerds! How do you recruit other nerds? They mostly seem to be into their own thing. How can I energize engagement?
ThrowawayR2 9 hours ago [-]
> "When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: 'Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.'" ... "If so, what are the real levers, and what do people consistently misunderstand?"
There are no "levers". People come to HN to discuss nerdy topics and those that have come to HN to help make those discussions more informed and interesting are welcome. Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately. And we are certainly not here to be a gauge of interest to any investors.
The one semi-exception is Show HN, which is intended to showcase something interesting that users can play with. There are separate specific guidelines for Show HN submissions (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and tips from the site moderators (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638). Do note that among the tips is the following "Drop any language that sounds like marketing or sales. On HN, that is an instant turnoff. Use factual, direct language. Personal stories and technical details are great." If you have questions about the guidelines or tips, the site moderators can be reached through the email on the contact page linked at the bottom of the page.
PurpleRamen 22 minutes ago [-]
> There are no "levers".
I disagree, there are always levers. But the "comfort-zone" of HN's mods and crowd is much smaller and more specific, while the attention on misbehaviour is much sharper, so the lever are not as easy to pull as on other platforms. HN is basically hard-mode, compared to any big noisy platform.
> Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately.
That's only true if it's done poorly, or outside HNs core-topics. There is a good deal of sneaky marketing on HN, but usually well integrated into the normal flow of comments, so It's either accepted in context, or low enough to fly under the radar. In a nutshell, this means, everything is accepted, as long as it brings value, high entertainment or satisfy curiosity, and is not just selling stupidly in your face.
At the end, HN is still a platform of smarter and more educated people, and they want to be handled on their level. If you can match this, you can pull every lever they've given space for. But of course, that's not something many can easily do.
esperent 2 hours ago [-]
> There are no "levers".
Everyone wants to believe that their community doesn't have levers. But this is just wishful thinking, ego talking. Of course HN has levers, of course the community here can be manipulated.
The easiest way I can see would be to frame a helpful, curious question to which your service just happens to be the answer. So then you most an Ask HN like "can anyone help me to understand why people do X" followed by a few sentences of your thoughts, then at the end say "I've been working on a service to help with this but we don't seem to be getting much to traction, here's a link".
Another approach would be "nerd sniping". Post your site but don't mention anything about what it's for and instead say "I'm having a problem with SSR rendering with NextJS on my site" or something like that. You'll get massive engagement.
lukan 2 hours ago [-]
"The easiest way I can see would be to frame a helpful, curious question to which your service just happens to be the answer. So then you most an Ask HN like "can anyone help me to understand why people do X" followed by a few sentences of your thoughts, then at the end say "I've been working on a service to help with this but we don't seem to be getting much to traction, here's a link"."
Nah, that would be obvious marketing to most. More sneaky would be answering the question with the recommendation from a different account in a way to promote your service and have that upvoted, but that requires more effort and skill I assume.
But in general yes, this community definitely can also be manipulated, but I would say it is one of the hardest to fool. The standard mentality here I actually would rather describe as critical instead of curious, but there is just lots of garbage being pushed and also my curiosity is limited.
throwaway2037 2 hours ago [-]
I love your nerd sniping idea. Literally, I used that same term in my post before I saw yours!
This makes me think of a fun idea: Once a year on HN (April Fool's Day?), we can have a nerd sniping competition where commercial projects try to nerd snipe HN readers with submarine adverts.
jacquesm 2 hours ago [-]
This says more about you than about HN I think.
Obviously anything can be manipulated, but HN has been remarkably resilient and if there is one thing the collective here is good at then it is at spotting patterns, even over a longer period of time. And once your business is banned from here there isn't really a way back in.
throwaway2037 2 hours ago [-]
Is there an easy way to show top 10 "Show HN" posts (by upvotes and/or comments) in the last one year? That might help this person to see what works on HN. I expect the list to have no obvious patterns except that they are wildly nerdy or unexpectedly useful. To be clear, I am not suggesting this list to make it easier for the original poster to manipulate the HN system. The readers here are way too discerning to be easily fooled by something obviously commercial appearing under the "Show HN" banner.
Two people that come to mind that normally generate an enormous number of upvotes and discussion are blog posts from Alyssa Rosenzweig (Asahi Linux GPU drivers) and Justine Tunney (Cosmopolitan Libc). Both of those projects trigger near-superhuman levels of nerd sniping (https://xkcd.com/356/). Few nerds can resist!
Final note: To me, this question feels like the "uncanny valley" of nerd discussion boards. Can you imagine posting something similar to LWN.net trying to figure out how to get your commercial project featured in a story?
antognini 4 hours ago [-]
I've found that there can be a lot of randomness for what makes the front page. Not too many people read the "New" page and articles drop off it pretty quickly, so it can be hard for a niche article to attract the handful of votes it needs to appear on the front page. (Though there is a "second chance" feature which helps to ameliorate this issue.) So there's a lot of randomness to what makes it onto the front page.
For instance I submitted an article three times (spaced a year apart). The first two times the article got no upvotes. The third time it got 600+ and hit the top of the front page. It's just a matter of who happens to be looking at the New page at the time.
Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago [-]
I've found that there is a snowball effect too
If someone has less votes and its still something I find interesting, I am more critic of the whole situation to upvote
But if someone already has 400 upvotes and is on the top of the site, I will look more into it with ("woah a lot of people upvoted, lets see why" and then read the comments and some of the comments are really brilliant that it becomes the reason why I upvote the post itself too
I am sure that hackernews doesnt really recommend it but I do feel like its something that I do subconsciously that I have observed and wanted to share. It does feel like random stuff but still in a way which still makes sense for the whole ethos of hackernews.
al_borland 4 hours ago [-]
If there were “levers” for people to pull to game the site, it would lose all its value and turn into nothing but low-effort self-promotion. I won’t claim to understand everything about HN, but I know that is not in the spirit of the site.
Animats 2 hours ago [-]
It works because it discusses important things that are of interest to reasonably smart people. The top 5 items right now.
- Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice
Ah, progress on cancer. But in mice, where lots of things work but don't transfer to humans.
- What Is an Elliptic Curve?
A core concept in modern cryptography which I don't understand. The article helped.
- Learn Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Only HN would put something like this near the top of of the forum.
- Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed
This week in LLMs. Have to keep up.
- OBS Studio Gets a New Renderer
They're using Apple's Metal for talking to the GPU? How does portability work? OBS runs on Linux and Windows, too, but Metal runs only on Apple machines.
These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things.
robot-wrangler 11 minutes ago [-]
> These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things.
This is not really your average front-page at the moment, and in fact it feels significantly more geared towards curiosity and less towards commercial interests compared with the usual. Partly because it's the holiday slow down but you see the same effect on weekends, which is telling. And IMHO hacker news is consistently more curious when America is sleeping.
HN desperately needs tags, which would serve everyone well, whether you're really here for curiosity or for all the corporate news. I'd really like to be able filter out most of the stuff for "working professionals" even if it is still legitimately technical (for example the recent docker and github news). What I usually want is all the hobby tech / PLT / open-source / science / learning-oriented stuff that's left over after that filter. I can imagine various reasons why forcing a "feed" style front-page is advantageous to some people.. but let's just say it's not about promoting curiosity.
lukan 2 hours ago [-]
"These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things."
I would argue Gemini is popular and commercially interesting, but yes, mainly it is a curious topic, whether one is invested in the current hype, or not.
baubino 7 hours ago [-]
This post makes me feel really old.
HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.
Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as opposed to communicating to promote or to manipulate or to drive traffic or to pull any number of other “levers”) is exceedingly a thing of the past.
kqr 4 hours ago [-]
> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.
That's an oversimplification. There are things that get responses because they're flamebait rather than interesting, and then even more interesting things that never get any discussion going.
I don't know if the residual factor is just "chance" or if there are controllable inputs involved.
(One thing I do suspect but cannot confirm is that article title has a large effect. Interesting stuff with bad title gets overlooked, and vice versa.)
PaulRobinson 4 hours ago [-]
The fact that HN does not work in exactly the same way as the horrid platforms out there that automagically surface things that make neurone in your head scream "click that thing! click it! look! LOOOOOOK!", does not mean your brain doesn't treat it the same way.
This isn't unique to this technology: books with interesting titles and covers sell better than books with boring titles and covers, even if the latter has more interesting content.
I think what makes HN a little different is that a lot of places we might congregate online only exist for the flamebait, or are specifically built around engagement metrics to serve DAU/MAU numbers and advertising asks. You just happen to take a bit more chance on here than you would anywhere else, and that's absolutely 100% a good thing.
If there are controllable inputs that skew you to one side of the variance, I hope the moment someone discovers them, they are shut down - otherwise this place just becomes another hell-hole.
superdisk 4 hours ago [-]
This is true. There are a few stock topics that will consistently get the fanboys out (Postgres, Ruby, Rust, SQLite) which is, IMO, usually just uninteresting fodder. And then interesting stuff which requires some intellectual engagement very often rots.
HN does have a much higher ratio of gems to dirt than any other place though, so I'm still here for the forseeable future :)
underdeserver 4 hours ago [-]
> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.
A simple way to refute this is to note that some links were posted multiple times and only got traction on the second or third time.
4 hours ago [-]
PaulRobinson 4 hours ago [-]
That's a feature, not a bug.
satisfice 4 hours ago [-]
Whether it's a feature or a bug, it's mysterious. Hence the question.
PaulRobinson 4 hours ago [-]
Couldn't agree with you more. The internet has, to borrow the word of the moment, become enshittified, and people think that's "normal".
People accept that platforms should be centralised, and that they should harvest your data in order to sell it to adtech companies who will then feed it to an industry that learns in real-time how to prey on your darkest fears to sell you things you don't need but might make you feel slightly less sad for a second. And people just accept it: that's normal these days.
They even call it doom-scrolling, and don't ask "wait, should I want to scroll through actual doom? Is the occasional video that makes me smile really worth it all?"
Perhaps it's my age, but I can't understand anybody who says their main form of media consumption is YouTube. How? How do you actually put up with that, knowing what is behind every mouse movement and click, and the knowledge that every single pixel in front of you is being tweaked by robotic neuroscientists squeezing every drop out of A/B tests to make you feel like utter crap? Like, seriously, WTAF?
HN is popular within its niche precisely because it isn't like that. It is not "a platform", in the modern and now normalised sense. It links out to other sites and asks people to come back together to discuss what they saw there. Old school. No ad tracking. No doom scrolling. Pick what you like. Click it, don't click it. Discuss it, don't discuss it. Nobody is tracking "engagement". There's some gamification, but does anyone _really_ care?
This type of interaction is entirely native to my generation and older (I just squeak into millennial, on the older side), but feels completely bonkers to people who think Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are what is normal and how the Internet works.
Some of know they're not normal. We know they're aberrations, ghouls that prey on unwitting masses.
keiferski 3 hours ago [-]
YouTube is easily the best “social network” in terms of having high-quality content with minimal manipulation. And I definitely consider it my main form of media consumption.
You just have to curate your feed and add stuff to playlists, not watch whatever is on the logged-out default home page.
lukan 2 hours ago [-]
What? You have to do a lot of curation and fighting the service itself (hiding shorts) to get to a bearable level. And I did not spend hours clicking things I don't like. I mostly just watch movies/clips I want, but my recommendations are full of clickbait manipulative garbage. So yes, one can find jewels in it - but only if digging through the garbage first.
keiferski 2 hours ago [-]
I watch a ton of great content by people that I subscribe to. It's not difficult or complicated to get there.
Not sure what else to say.
lukan 2 hours ago [-]
But you don't agree it took a lot of effort to hide the garbage?
keiferski 2 hours ago [-]
Not really, if anything, there is too much stuff I want to watch that is suggested to me.
I suppose if you created an account today you'd be fed a lot of garbage, but I've been watching YouTube often for at least a couple years.
anigbrowl 10 hours ago [-]
Do you mean 'how do get a Show HN project to earn a lot of votes'?
Be somewhat novel, communicate very clearly (particularly what is' for and why you might want to use it, even if that seems obvious to you) and post around mid-morning PST so people can goof off from work to 'research' your interesting new thing.
nospice 3 hours ago [-]
A good portion of it is just pure chance. There are relatively few people patrolling new submissions, and if something doesn't get a couple of upvotes in the first hour or so, it just disappears down the memory hole. So, you'll sometimes lose even if your content is good.
Another part of the equation is topic and tone. There's no sophisticated algorithm, but it's an eclectic forum, so if your post sounds like pure marketing or self-promo, it will probably not make it far. You need to offer something of value to readers, not to you.
An interesting quirk of the system is that people who upvote or comment on stories don't necessarily read them. A lot of HN discussion boils down to people reacting to the prompt in the subject line. There are publications that learned how to game this. I don't think it's a template worth following, but it sells...
voidfunc 35 minutes ago [-]
Theres a whole cottage industry of marketing folks that work on gaming HN. Its a system like any other.
krapp 14 minutes ago [-]
Yes. HN was created as "Startup News" by a Silicon Valley startup incubator and plenty of people here make gaming visibility a central part of their strategy for promoting their startup or promoting themselves as thought leaders to YC. I think the young'uns call it "aura farming."
A lot of the rest are people who work in SV or are startup entrepreneurs who want HN to be nothing more than a tech news and startup forum. These are the people who downvote anything they consider "nontechnical."
HN has a lot of good content and discussion, but it would be naive to pretend there aren't business interests at play on HN, and that everyone here is operating in good faith. Even though the guidelines require it.
If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
HN is not a nail. Stop trying to hit it.
edent 3 hours ago [-]
Do you want to know a secret?
Sometimes my friends post on social media platform A "Hey, I've just posted on platform B. Upvotes appreciated."
Or a newsletter will say "please share this post on…"
Or people on Discord / Slack / Matrix will say "people are being mean to me on platform C, where are my defenders at?"
HN feels organic - and is pretty well moderated - but it isn't immune to family & friends giving something an initial boost.
But if no one wants to discuss it, the post will falter.
As for the other levers, it is hard to say. Sometimes the posts I've worked hardest on with the most detail just die a death. But the half-finished thought casually tossed off will Do Numbers. Outrage sometimes works, but it is a fickle friend to tame. Catchy titles aren't clickbait (despite what some people say) but they work best when they are descriptive.
And, finally, people can and do resubmit stuff. What doesn't work at 0900 Monday will be popular at 1700 Tuesday. Why? That's just the way it is.
In the end, it is all luck. But, as the saying goes, the harder you work the luckier you get.
3 hours ago [-]
sph 13 minutes ago [-]
I made a Show HN once, for my project. It provided a lot of eyes, users, and useful comments. But as it often happens, the first time I posted it it got lost into the cacophony and no one cared. I reached out to the mods, asked if I could qualify for the second chance pool [1] and my project had, finally, a chance in the spotlight.
Hacker News is too large. There's too many people and honestly not many hackers. The voting system is silly. What rises to the top is the common denominator, not what is truly interesting to any niche.
Another thing to know: a post with too many comments vs upvotes will be sent to the shadow realm. This is claimed to help deal with hot-button topics, but I've seen many interesting post that suffer the same fate because people have a lot of interesting things to share. I've seen it happen on a post about Forth of all things, with the greybeards coming to chime about something few care about, and it got hidden pretty quickly. Given the numbers, this will be the fate of your post as well.
Only dang knows how this place works. You can get an inkling of its working by being here a while and piecing it together from his comments.
I've had mixed feelings about HN in terms of how people perceive a product over the last few years. I used to have an overwhelmingly positive opinions about the community up until COVID: everyone started making the "solution that will help researchers find a cure", which, in all instances, ended up being tons of people independently loading up papers into elasticsearch. And when I pointed out that they are all solving a problem no one has, I got jumped by a ton of people going "nooooo you just don't understand how powerful what these systems are". At the end, none of those turned out to be the silver bullet, or a bullet for that matter.
Recently it's the AI craze: you have a complex problem to solve: "AI can easily do that". You have infrastructure issues: "AI can easily do that". You have issues processing petabytes of data fast and efficiently: "AI can easily solve that". I am getting a ton of bots trying to access my home network: "AI can easily solve that". I am having a hard time falling asleep: "AI". I have a flu: "AI".
In a nutshell, the shiny new toy syndrome is very common so the reception of a product is not a guarantee for success. To give you an example: recently some people(pretty active on here) got in touch with me with regards to an initiative I am a part of: they claimed that they wanted some expertise on the subject I agreed to schedule a call. It turned out to be a sales pitch for yet another product which tries to solve a problem but it does not because the people who built it fundamentally do not understand the problem. Forget the fact that I am not interested in being their client, given that it's a volunteer project and none of the people involved are paid to do it(if anything, we are paying from our own pockets to keep it alive), it was yet another techbro product which tries to build a skyscraper starting from the roof. Except the ground underneath is partially lava, partially a swamp.
I think it is all related to the impostor syndrome: young people have it, they get a bit older and gain confidence. By the time people hit their early to mid 30s, they start realizing that most of the world operates on patches over patches and 2 layers down, no one has a clue what is going on.
asim 2 hours ago [-]
To echo what dang said in the thread. It's a place to hang out and learn about new things. Or sometimes old things. It's news, it's history. All with a tech skew. I've had this account since 2008. In that time I've used it in many different ways, including getting stuff onto the front page. Honestly trying to game it doesn't work. Post something people genuinely find interesting and it will make it to the front page and in the case it doesn't sometimes the mod will see that and think it should get another shot.
npodbielski 2 hours ago [-]
HN is great for that stuff. Though I genuinely lack a good site with just developers news. HN is not that. I was using Code Project for that but it gone bankrupt. Other dev news sites seems to be closer to facebook with AI generated articles than to actual interesting development stuff.
asim 42 minutes ago [-]
Yea its a mixed bag. I think some people like https://lobste.rs and there's always https://dev.to. But if that doesn't work there's also infinite sub-reddits on Reddit or classically tailoring your own RSS feed using Feedly or similar. I got to that place where I've curated my source of news but it's by category; Crypto, Dev, Finance, Islam, Politics, Tech, UK, World. I've got a feed for each and it's all grouped in a single UI like this https://mu.xyz/home
maxbond 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds like analysis paralysis. Read posts here, pay attention to what this audience expects, and then post your work. If you really want to find a source on this topic Michael Lynch (mtlynch) wrote a book called Hit the Front Page of Hacker News and you can find it if you search for it (I haven't actually read it), but I think spending an hour a week reading HN and asking yourself why a piece of writing did or didn't work for this audience would be more worthwhile.
aj_g 46 minutes ago [-]
The answer is in the name. The word 'hacker' used to more refer to someone who is a tinkerer, diy engineer, curious about how systems, components, etc work. Hacker News is still somewhat true to this ethos, what's popular here aligns with this old-school curiosity mindset. Of course the exact interests of the userbase has changed over the years, but if you spend a lot of time on this forum you eventually understand some of the common themes that get the minds of the hackers turning.
Unfortunately due to the enshittification of things people are conditioned to see HN as something to be gamed and leveraged for personal gain now, but in general it's algorithm-less enough, the the mods are strict enough, (thank god) that the type of content here stays pointed towards the original 'hacker' ideals.
internet2000 5 hours ago [-]
Please don't try to game the algorithm here.
yen223 4 hours ago [-]
The trick to gaming the algorithm here is to post interesting original content that software-focused people like to read
Don't tell the mods!
PaulRobinson 3 hours ago [-]
Broadly true, but I think we can let the hardware-focused people in now and again, even if they do make an awful noise as they drag their knuckles along the floor :)
abraae 4 hours ago [-]
Or do, so that weaknesses can be identified and fixed.
ivanjermakov 2 hours ago [-]
Key ingredients of a successful HN story are effort, passion, and curiosity.
Without effort, anyone can do it. Without passion, it's just work. Without curiosity, it's not hacking.
echelon 4 hours ago [-]
This is what the whole internet was like from 1995 - 2005.
kevin061 1 hours ago [-]
I think it is quite simple. Hacker News. News for hackers. Not in the "hacking" Hollywood sense of computer crimes (although there's some of that, too), but in the sense of intellectual curiosity.
Probably more than 70% of your post's impact will come from a catchy headline. People will be curious about your headline, and click through. And then, upvote if they find it interesting.
If the post is interesting but the headline isn't, then, well, bad luck.
Once a post gathers enough momentum, it goes to the front page. Then, there are a thousand bots on Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc, that repost articles that got to the front page, and it gathers even more momentum from a large portion of technologists that don't have an HN account but follow these bots.
elcapitan 2 hours ago [-]
Hackernews SEO agency when?
ares623 4 hours ago [-]
The forum is a harsh mistress
rolph 10 hours ago [-]
generally politics, and religion, are topics not amenable to prolonged discussion, and slide into hostile disagreement.
use prefixes [Tell HN: Ask HN: Show HN:] and suffixes [ [PDF] [video] [1995] ] where needed.
be a human being, dont repost, or post promotional materials for adspace, cultivate a nuts and guts discussion for any project you promote rather than a sales ad.
manuelmoreale 2 hours ago [-]
Years ago I wrote [0] about the lessons I learned by reaching the front page of both HN and Product Hunt and honestly, all these years later, the only thing I can confidently say is that I don't know shit. Sometimes people posts here things I wrote and for one reason or another they gain traction.
I personally have no clue why and I kinda like it. Like probably many others I come here to find interesting content and have interesting conversation because there are a lot of genuinely interesting people on this site.
But if you're trying to minmaxing your presence on HN, well good luck.
New Job discipline born:
"Hacker News Visibility Consultant Services", like there are companys optimizing your position in the app stores :-D
ChrisMarshallNY 4 hours ago [-]
[Laughs nervously]
I bet that this isn’t an exaggeration. Being highly-ranked on HN can probably give a startup a huge advantage, in the hype department.
I guarantee that LLMs are currently being feverishly trained on HN front pages, for the last few years, and we’re gonna be seeing “link farm” sites, specifically designed to rank high on HN.
I enjoy it here. I don’t hang out on any other social media, so this place gets a lot of my time (I’m writing this right now, as I’m working up some tired, to go back to sleep). I’ve spent my entire life, hanging around people that intimidate and inspire me, so this place feels like home.
If it turns into a Dead Internet site, I’ll probably pack it in. I have left a number of sites, over the years. It would make me sad, as I’ve lasted longer here, than anywhere else.
Most of my karma is from comments, not submissions. I like to engage.
pavlov 4 hours ago [-]
What I find strange is that life feels oddly opaque. I’ve never met anyone who can clearly explain how it works in practice. Not just the rules, but the dynamics: what’s repeatable, what’s luck, and what actually matters.
iwanttocomment 11 hours ago [-]
You post the thing.
The HN audience upvotes it or downvotes it or flags it or ignores it.
From the reaction, you get an impression of the reception of the thing.
That's... it.
rramadass 47 minutes ago [-]
Is this some kind of a "Reflexive Control" Psyop ?
How much is it worth for you to know ? ;-)
politelemon 3 hours ago [-]
I think I can safely say that nobody understands ~~quantum~~ hacker news
Dolpheyn 4 hours ago [-]
The round table has no levers
dizhn 3 hours ago [-]
Are you talking about this website or Ycombinator?
sylware 1 hours ago [-]
What I know: the karma system is broken, because it is very hard to provide a controversial opinion/fact without being mass de-karma-ed.
For instance, there is serious hate here about web interop with classic noscript/basic (x)html browsers (namely basic HTML forms with at best <video> <audio> elements, optional simple CSS, often a document which is a "semantic" 2D html table with proper ids for navigation, encrypted URL parameters are your friends).
And AIs...
2 hours ago [-]
d--b 2 hours ago [-]
Ok. So you'd like to promote: https://www.legitcontrol.com/ (at least you'll get your link in one comment here, no need to thank me ;-))
A system that somehow allows you to tame AI agents' unruly use of git (is that it?)
I see you did use Show HN, and that didn't work.
What you could have done is email hn@ycombinator.com telling them that your Show HN is not being upvoted. This happens, and usually dang and others mod will take a look and if you're within the guidelines will give it a small boost so it shows up in the main Show HN page. Then you're on your own.
Make sure your catchphrase, or hook is well written, cause most people here will not read past "Make Agents a Safe Collaborator in your App".
Anyways, as others said here. There are no ways to "game" HN. the closest you will manage is what you just did, basically asking for help...
That's the key, ask for help, and people will respond. People are nice, and they are willing to procrastinate their intellect away for free.
lovich 4 hours ago [-]
The forum tries to not be gameable. If it’s in its ideal state then it works when you have something that is legitimately interesting to the community, although it’s up to the interpreter to decide how well that works.
The only really opaque thing I’ve found is the anti spam/anti flame war rules but it’s not crazy to keep those secret and I say that as someone who gets temp banned by those rules on here frequently
edit: oh, you should also go to your profile and set showdead to `yes` if you want to see the unfiltered forum. You'll get about 10% controversial opinions and 90% green name accounts posting spam.
Ah and if the poster's name is green in your browser it means they are a very new account
onion2k 3 hours ago [-]
When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”
Unless you're building a start up where the potential customers are specifically HN and Reddit readers, get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots.
As lovely and wonderful as the readers of HN and Reddit are, being loved on HN or Reddit means essentially nothing. People here are the magpies of the internet - we love seeing the new shiny thing but that does not tell you it will be a success with the people who might want to buy it. For every Dropbox posted here there are hundreds of Show HN posts that didn't really go anywhere despite having tons of very positive commentary.
If you want to show investors that your start up's product has potential post about it where your customers go and get feedback from people who might give you their money. If you really want to prove your start up has potential, sell to those people and actually get their money. If you can get a sale based on your prototype/proof-of-concept/MVP product that is worth more than a million "Yeah, looks ace, I'd buy that if it was <price that's far too low>." posts from us.
RobotToaster 3 hours ago [-]
> get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots.
Surely idiot investors are the easiest to get money from?
badtuple 3 hours ago [-]
Ideally you'll be working with the investors and leveraging their expertise and connections. If you're choosing an investor that you'll be working with for years, it's worth looking for things in addition to money.
heavyset_go 21 minutes ago [-]
You don't want to be beholden to an idiot, or at least I don't
Sander_Marechal 3 hours ago [-]
Even idiot investors eventually want their money back. And they will ruin you in the process with their idiotic ideas.
Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago [-]
The magpies of the internet sounds like a really cool name for what its worth, dont mind if I steal it :)
I played inscryption (a really good game) and magpie had the sigil of being able to take any card from the deck and oh my, it was a beauty seeing a magpie or the sigil because that meant that I could then get any overpowered card I had from the deck.
I am sure people might not understand it if they haven't played the game but everytime I hear magpie, Its almost obligatory for me to mention inscryption. (also the same goes for stoat and ouroborous too)
drsim 3 hours ago [-]
I love HN. And the Show HN graveyard is huge! Many a time I’ve searched, found a post I thought sounded cool, and it’s dead… sometimes in just a couple of months.
simonmales 3 hours ago [-]
This is a hard truth. I looked at my own Show HN post history, some are definitely in the graveyard.
hamasho 3 hours ago [-]
If I remember correctly, when Dropbox announced its launch most replies here were “but I can self host rsync!!” Well, turned out most people can’t.
RobotToaster 3 hours ago [-]
> get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots.
teekert 3 hours ago [-]
Of course, the Dropbox post has a meme-level example of an HNer predicting its popularity :) [0]
That said, it also often happen that you share something and it is not picked up, even though after 10 years I think I can predict what HN loves. Sometimes a repost after 2 days will hit the front page, certainly not always.
Also, people here are probably too technically inclined to understand what normal people want. If you look at the $500/mo side projects thread, there's a bunch of projects where HN would probably say: 'but anyone can do that themselves using X'.
Like the person creating coloring pages from images using Stable Diffusion. Many HN users would just do it themselves, but many parents have no idea how to do that.
Makes me wonder how many potentially successful businesses never get built, because too many people are trying to build the next big YC project with AI or whatever tech is hype today.
re-thc 2 hours ago [-]
> Many HN users would just do it themselves
More likes “claim” to do it themselves. Commenting on the Internet is easy. Making effort is not.
> Makes me wonder how many potentially successful businesses never get built, because too many people are trying to build the next big YC project
The can do it yourself crowd will still claim anything can be done themselves no matter big or small.
csomar 2 hours ago [-]
It is not clear what exactly you are looking for?
> “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”
From my experience, both HN and Reddit have the worst traffic. I got "tens of thousands" of visitors from both with exactly zero conversion. I am now getting a few hundreds a month from Google and other sources and the conversion rate is roughly 20-25%. So pretty much not worth it to pursue HN/Reddit for your startup though your mileage would probably vary.
I'd use HackerNews for what it is, a news site for casual/mixed information with sometimes interesting discussions. You could have much better levers in other places.
StanislavPetrov 3 hours ago [-]
One of the real levers is that if you get randomly and inexplicably locked out of your Google account and your whole life/business is destroyed, posting on Hacker News might be your only chance at redemption.
3 hours ago [-]
bicepjai 3 hours ago [-]
It’s disappointing that a normal democratic forum run is alien to folks. Of course, there are moderators as we cannot expect everyone to behave :)
NicoJuicy 4 hours ago [-]
The algorithm was shared in the past.
The scoring is pretty simple tbh
- the older it is, the less score
- the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score
- penalties reduce the score ( eg. By moderator)
How it works for the end-user:
- People browsing in newest, make it visible in the main page.
- Most people see the main page
Result: interesting topics go to the main page
retsibsi 2 hours ago [-]
> the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score
Unless this has changed, I don't think comments contribute positively to the score. Apparently they (used to?) contribute negatively if there are more comments than upvotes and the number of comments exceeds some threshold. See e.g. this very old article: https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall...
> In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this.
themafia 3 hours ago [-]
Additionally: Time of day and day of week seem to matter.
JojoFatsani 11 hours ago [-]
It’s just a a forum
wisty 3 hours ago [-]
Bad: "I wrote a web app"
Good: "Why I used Postgres to write a web app"
imvetri 3 hours ago [-]
Writers.
Money.
A spot as US citizen to get into startup school.
Money.
An investment from a noble mind to another noble mind.
Money.
Pass information to fellows at YC (who are from a different domain, see YC as a cool place) they crowd and promote (seems organic)
Money.
Well, then the product or the tech fades, because its a bloatware.
They retry the same thing again with next batch of people.
Keeps the forum running.
The maintainers get retired or really tired.
Readers.
I have seen this one before.
Reader.
Well, now, you are old
kergonath 4 hours ago [-]
This question seems very strange, because it’s really not difficult to understand how it works. You submit, people vote if they like it, but mostly ignore it, and occasionally flag it. Stories that generated interests rise, sometimes to the point where they end up in the front page. Stories that generate too much unwanted interest (e.g. that look too much like flame wars, or like never-ending discussions that go nowhere) sink to the bottom. There are corner cases and you won’t get the exact algorithm, partly because human moderators intervene as well.
If there is one thing to note, it’s that obvious self-promotion is not good. Technical details are more interesting than sales pitches.
satisfice 3 hours ago [-]
For years I thought that Hacker News has no moderators. Apparently it does, but they seem to keep a low profile. I have no idea what their protocol is and I don't see any help menu that mentions them.
I found out, the other day, that if you post too many comments in too short a time (also undocumented) your final comment is deleted (sorry, you just lose it) instantly with a somewhat snarky message about how you post too much.
I am a little mystified about what community Hacker News serves. It doesn't seem to be the kind of hackers I grew up with (fiercely skeptical, a la 2600 magazine), because, as one example, skepticism about AI or self-driving vehicles is generally downvoted.
Not so much Hacker News as Next Shiny Toy News.
Even so, I know of no better way to discover interesting tools and trends than Hacker News.
renewiltord 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah bro. If you go to YC and do well enough they'll tell you. They'll put you in the second chance pool. They'll tell you not to upvote from the profile page, or from a direct link to the YC story page.
But the reason they won't tell you is that the entire reason it works is because you don't know.
4 hours ago [-]
Traubenfuchs 4 hours ago [-]
It‘s clearly manipulated/curated, you can tell my some absolutely shitty content with zero comments and zero engagement ending up and staying on the frontpage for quite a while.
jacquesm 3 hours ago [-]
I've been here for a while and that's not a pattern that I recognize, could you point out a few examples? I am fairly sure the mods would love to hear about this as well.
Rendered at 10:41:22 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The root of HN is a thing called 'startup news', that was changed very quickly and since then HN has been a focal point for techies of all sorts but also lots of other people from all walks of life and from a large variety of countries. It isn't 'one thing' to everybody that participates, just like a hammer is a different thing for a carpenter than it is for a masoner or a farmer.
The fact that after being a member for a couple of years you have this question indicates a lack of participation, not a lack of understanding.
Its also the currently last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.
You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.
HN is its own little world and that’s fine.
Everything has a cost. For the web, that's typically monetary or your data and attention to advertisers. I think you're right that the cost of Hacker News is that my participation is lending some (tiny incremental) legitimacy to Y Combinator. It's also costing some tiny amount of my attention, in the sense that I may not have heard of Y Combinator if it weren't for Hacker News. For me personally, that is absolutely fine – but I'm glad you made it explicit so that it's a conscious choice.
[Edit: Of course it costs an absolutely vast amount of my attention :-) but I mean only a teeny tiny fraction of that is "payment" in the sense of noticing that Y Combinator exists.]
That's up to you, really, you can just ignore them. I know I do.
> So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.
Probably, or maybe that is just an overly cynical take. If it were as bad as that I can think of a couple of very easy things they could do to improve on that and they aren't so for now I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Note that I'm not particularly impressed by anybody associated with YC except the mods here.
> Its also the last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.
So you're saying there is hope for Haskell?
> You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.
There are some pretty funny instances of such interaction here, the best of which still has me in stitches after more than a decade.
I am not asking how you use it. I am asking what you believe is the reason the site operator is running it.
Why do I take in parcels for my neighbour if a courier knocks on my door? She doesn’t pay me. It wouldn’t cause me any harm if I didn’t. But it makes the place nicer to live, and I’ve become friends with her as a result.
She invited me to dinner recently and fed me delicious food, and we drank very good champagne. That was an unexpected bonus.
“To promote ycombinator” only works if there’s an audience worth promoting to. Building something great that brings people back day after day maybe has the result that it can also serve as a promotional tool - but that’s a bonus, not necessarily a purpose.
I’m not the person you asked the question of - but I think the purpose of ycombinator is to give relevant people a place to discuss things aligned with the ecosystem in which ycombinator operates, to help strengthen and champion that ecosystem. Does it have a payoff for ycombinator? Almost certainly. Was it created with that explicit purpose in mind? I doubt it. There are easier ways to make money.
Sure, it can be frustrating if you're trying to promote a product or farm karma on posts. But the fact that mostly nobody cares about karma means that you can post something and have it be evaluated on its technical, economic, social merits.
Obviously, there are caveats to this - i.e., anything US- and FAANG-related is bound to get much more activity than otherwise - but the overall atmosphere of HN is refreshing compared to Reddit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46309399
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
As to how I (or anyone) could show this, here are a few example questions:
1. How many examples of stealthy but otherwise blatant promotion do you see in the comments? Not every astroturfing campaign will be successful or original, so you'd be able to notice some patterns. Plus, HN is already commercially oriented, and there's the "Show HN" option, so it reduces the incentives for astroturfing.
2. Alternatively, how much controversy is there around the specific type of forum? For some subreddits, for example, you'd be able to see counter-subreddits popping up when participants feel the mods are abusing their power to promote one type of opinion.
3. Is a certain type of political/brand-related opinion or interpretation always at the top of your comment feed? For example, if upvotes determine the order of the comments, do you consistently see fewer critical comments on things that you'd expect the community to react to in different ways.
4. Do you consistently see some contributors having more power in discussions over others? Other than the mods, obviously. If this is the case, karma (i.e., number of upvotes) often has more value.
Still, I could be wrong.
That’s a handwave trying to dismiss a host of valid concerns by lumping them together. It reads like “you probably want to game HN; stop doing so”.
Just a random issue that has been repeatedly brought up for at least a decade: HN is completely unusable for people with vision impairments relying on assistive technologies. It doesn’t use semantic HTML elements, it doesn’t use ARIA tags, its fonts and colors violate WCAG standards (which your browser’s dev tools will be happy to show you in detail), etc.
If the site is so blatantly unfriendly towards a significant minority of its potential users, apparently due to sheer negligence or “works for me” elitist attitude, I see no reason to believe that other aspects of the site are the way they are “on purpose”.
Accessibility is a problem and assuming it is as bad as you say it is it really should be addressed, agreed.
But that's completely orthogonal to being hard to game. And the concerns the OP brings up are unrelated to accessibility and indeed read more about instructions on how to game HN more successfully, otherwise why bring the VCs and the 'levers' into it in the first place?
YES.
> HN is completely unusable for people with vision impairments relying on assistive technologies.
For one, this is unrelated to allowing marketers to game the system.
For two, how much are you hyperbolizing there? I only ask because I was having a conversation in comments with a blind HN-er only like 3 days ago.
Indeed, in spite of wearing glasses that correct me 100%, that font is way too small.
Yes accessibility would be nice, I agree, but if I’m understaffed, provide free as in beer service where being on the first page is worth millions in marketing spend and being top 1 for a few hours is worth tens if not hundreds so I’m constantly under attack from everyone and their dog who have anything at all to sell, it’s going to be hard to prioritize other things.
…yeah I agree they should hire an intern or something to just fix this on slow burn.
> Mr. Cook replied --with an uncharacteristic display of emotion--that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues. "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." It was the same thing for environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas that don’t have an immediate profit. The company does "a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it."
> Reportedly looking directly at the NCPPR representative, he said, "If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks.
But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are links to past explanations about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
We try to elevate things that gratify curiosity: creative work, surprising discoveries, deep dives, technical achievements, unusual personal experience, whimsical unpredictability, good conversation, etc. And we try to demote things that run against curiosity, especially repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion.
It gets complicated because you'll also see plenty of repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion on HN—alas! This is the internet after all. But the site survives because the balance of these things stays within tolerable ranges, thanks to two factors: an active community which cares greatly about preserving this place for intended purpose (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html); and an owner (Y Combinator) which pays us to work on the site full time and mainly just wants us to keep it good, to the extent possible.
If you really want to figure this place out, the way to do it is as a reader. Hang out on the site, look at the mix of articles that make the frontpage, spend time in the discussion threads (hopefully the interesting sectors and not the flamey ones!), and over time your eyes will adjust.
What doesn't work—and this is good because we want it not to work—is approaching HN as a platform for promoting content. If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, but anyone) mainly care about "how can I use this thing to get attention for my startup/blog/project/newsletter", then you're operating in 'push' mode rather than 'pull' mode (or, even better, 'idle' mode). In that case you won't be curious because you're too focused on what you're wanting for extraneous reasons—and if you aren't in a state of curiosity, this place won't make sense. At least we hope it won't!
Yesterday the top comment on two stories I went to discuss had deep and meaningful content, before the last line which was a "and I talk about this stuff all the time on my newsletter [link]", and I was conflicted. Same poster each time.
The poster had done the HN thing: responded with thoughtful examination of TFA, unique and interesting insight, and I don't feel it was AI generated.
And then they marred it. They pushed something just slightly out of context. Not entirely, just a smidge.
I hope we can keep an eye on that sort of thing around here, it feels like it could slide into something...
The grey area is people constantly linking to their own blog, but the linked post is relevant (example [0]). Like, it's good when people post relevant links to diver deeper, but when it's constantly your own content, that irks me a bit.
[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Like https://xkcd.com/810/
Purpose of hackernews as you said is fulfilling curiosity, its not a place where people should try to post to get eyeballs or something because their investors said so.
Honestly hackernews to me is a place where tinkering as a hobby is appreciated. I have read so many large threads here and ended up sometimes having a new point of view on something and so many posts here which make me want to be curious and tinker around too. I cannot really name something exactly which clicks on hackernews but that is what makes it unique and this does mean I cannot explain it to others sometimes since my hobbies are tangential to hackernews too, I just end up saying my hobby is tinkering with computers (currently only software)
A lot of the comments and input here make sense. I’ll follow your advice and observe HN for a while, looking for interesting topics that suit me.
The use of em dashes looks pretty natural to me. This is how they were used before LLMs, and what LLMs learned from.
Em dashes have a useful place in written language. I hope we will not lose their utility because people treat them as enough of a signal on their own to automatically question the authenticity of absolutely well-written pieces of text, without giving the matter any further consideration.
"The royal you"
If you post when silicon valley wakes up on a weekday, you might get “initial” points faster, which leads to your submission being ranked higher up for a while and being more discoverable.
There are no "levers". People come to HN to discuss nerdy topics and those that have come to HN to help make those discussions more informed and interesting are welcome. Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately. And we are certainly not here to be a gauge of interest to any investors.
The one semi-exception is Show HN, which is intended to showcase something interesting that users can play with. There are separate specific guidelines for Show HN submissions (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and tips from the site moderators (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638). Do note that among the tips is the following "Drop any language that sounds like marketing or sales. On HN, that is an instant turnoff. Use factual, direct language. Personal stories and technical details are great." If you have questions about the guidelines or tips, the site moderators can be reached through the email on the contact page linked at the bottom of the page.
I disagree, there are always levers. But the "comfort-zone" of HN's mods and crowd is much smaller and more specific, while the attention on misbehaviour is much sharper, so the lever are not as easy to pull as on other platforms. HN is basically hard-mode, compared to any big noisy platform.
> Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately.
That's only true if it's done poorly, or outside HNs core-topics. There is a good deal of sneaky marketing on HN, but usually well integrated into the normal flow of comments, so It's either accepted in context, or low enough to fly under the radar. In a nutshell, this means, everything is accepted, as long as it brings value, high entertainment or satisfy curiosity, and is not just selling stupidly in your face.
At the end, HN is still a platform of smarter and more educated people, and they want to be handled on their level. If you can match this, you can pull every lever they've given space for. But of course, that's not something many can easily do.
Everyone wants to believe that their community doesn't have levers. But this is just wishful thinking, ego talking. Of course HN has levers, of course the community here can be manipulated.
The easiest way I can see would be to frame a helpful, curious question to which your service just happens to be the answer. So then you most an Ask HN like "can anyone help me to understand why people do X" followed by a few sentences of your thoughts, then at the end say "I've been working on a service to help with this but we don't seem to be getting much to traction, here's a link".
Another approach would be "nerd sniping". Post your site but don't mention anything about what it's for and instead say "I'm having a problem with SSR rendering with NextJS on my site" or something like that. You'll get massive engagement.
Nah, that would be obvious marketing to most. More sneaky would be answering the question with the recommendation from a different account in a way to promote your service and have that upvoted, but that requires more effort and skill I assume.
But in general yes, this community definitely can also be manipulated, but I would say it is one of the hardest to fool. The standard mentality here I actually would rather describe as critical instead of curious, but there is just lots of garbage being pushed and also my curiosity is limited.
This makes me think of a fun idea: Once a year on HN (April Fool's Day?), we can have a nerd sniping competition where commercial projects try to nerd snipe HN readers with submarine adverts.
Obviously anything can be manipulated, but HN has been remarkably resilient and if there is one thing the collective here is good at then it is at spotting patterns, even over a longer period of time. And once your business is banned from here there isn't really a way back in.
Two people that come to mind that normally generate an enormous number of upvotes and discussion are blog posts from Alyssa Rosenzweig (Asahi Linux GPU drivers) and Justine Tunney (Cosmopolitan Libc). Both of those projects trigger near-superhuman levels of nerd sniping (https://xkcd.com/356/). Few nerds can resist!
Final note: To me, this question feels like the "uncanny valley" of nerd discussion boards. Can you imagine posting something similar to LWN.net trying to figure out how to get your commercial project featured in a story?
For instance I submitted an article three times (spaced a year apart). The first two times the article got no upvotes. The third time it got 600+ and hit the top of the front page. It's just a matter of who happens to be looking at the New page at the time.
If someone has less votes and its still something I find interesting, I am more critic of the whole situation to upvote
But if someone already has 400 upvotes and is on the top of the site, I will look more into it with ("woah a lot of people upvoted, lets see why" and then read the comments and some of the comments are really brilliant that it becomes the reason why I upvote the post itself too
I am sure that hackernews doesnt really recommend it but I do feel like its something that I do subconsciously that I have observed and wanted to share. It does feel like random stuff but still in a way which still makes sense for the whole ethos of hackernews.
- Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice
Ah, progress on cancer. But in mice, where lots of things work but don't transfer to humans.
- What Is an Elliptic Curve?
A core concept in modern cryptography which I don't understand. The article helped.
- Learn Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Only HN would put something like this near the top of of the forum.
- Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed
This week in LLMs. Have to keep up.
- OBS Studio Gets a New Renderer
They're using Apple's Metal for talking to the GPU? How does portability work? OBS runs on Linux and Windows, too, but Metal runs only on Apple machines.
These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things.
This is not really your average front-page at the moment, and in fact it feels significantly more geared towards curiosity and less towards commercial interests compared with the usual. Partly because it's the holiday slow down but you see the same effect on weekends, which is telling. And IMHO hacker news is consistently more curious when America is sleeping.
HN desperately needs tags, which would serve everyone well, whether you're really here for curiosity or for all the corporate news. I'd really like to be able filter out most of the stuff for "working professionals" even if it is still legitimately technical (for example the recent docker and github news). What I usually want is all the hobby tech / PLT / open-source / science / learning-oriented stuff that's left over after that filter. I can imagine various reasons why forcing a "feed" style front-page is advantageous to some people.. but let's just say it's not about promoting curiosity.
I would argue Gemini is popular and commercially interesting, but yes, mainly it is a curious topic, whether one is invested in the current hype, or not.
HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.
Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as opposed to communicating to promote or to manipulate or to drive traffic or to pull any number of other “levers”) is exceedingly a thing of the past.
That's an oversimplification. There are things that get responses because they're flamebait rather than interesting, and then even more interesting things that never get any discussion going.
I don't know if the residual factor is just "chance" or if there are controllable inputs involved.
(One thing I do suspect but cannot confirm is that article title has a large effect. Interesting stuff with bad title gets overlooked, and vice versa.)
This isn't unique to this technology: books with interesting titles and covers sell better than books with boring titles and covers, even if the latter has more interesting content.
I think what makes HN a little different is that a lot of places we might congregate online only exist for the flamebait, or are specifically built around engagement metrics to serve DAU/MAU numbers and advertising asks. You just happen to take a bit more chance on here than you would anywhere else, and that's absolutely 100% a good thing.
If there are controllable inputs that skew you to one side of the variance, I hope the moment someone discovers them, they are shut down - otherwise this place just becomes another hell-hole.
HN does have a much higher ratio of gems to dirt than any other place though, so I'm still here for the forseeable future :)
A simple way to refute this is to note that some links were posted multiple times and only got traction on the second or third time.
People accept that platforms should be centralised, and that they should harvest your data in order to sell it to adtech companies who will then feed it to an industry that learns in real-time how to prey on your darkest fears to sell you things you don't need but might make you feel slightly less sad for a second. And people just accept it: that's normal these days.
They even call it doom-scrolling, and don't ask "wait, should I want to scroll through actual doom? Is the occasional video that makes me smile really worth it all?"
Perhaps it's my age, but I can't understand anybody who says their main form of media consumption is YouTube. How? How do you actually put up with that, knowing what is behind every mouse movement and click, and the knowledge that every single pixel in front of you is being tweaked by robotic neuroscientists squeezing every drop out of A/B tests to make you feel like utter crap? Like, seriously, WTAF?
HN is popular within its niche precisely because it isn't like that. It is not "a platform", in the modern and now normalised sense. It links out to other sites and asks people to come back together to discuss what they saw there. Old school. No ad tracking. No doom scrolling. Pick what you like. Click it, don't click it. Discuss it, don't discuss it. Nobody is tracking "engagement". There's some gamification, but does anyone _really_ care?
This type of interaction is entirely native to my generation and older (I just squeak into millennial, on the older side), but feels completely bonkers to people who think Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are what is normal and how the Internet works.
Some of know they're not normal. We know they're aberrations, ghouls that prey on unwitting masses.
You just have to curate your feed and add stuff to playlists, not watch whatever is on the logged-out default home page.
Not sure what else to say.
I suppose if you created an account today you'd be fed a lot of garbage, but I've been watching YouTube often for at least a couple years.
Be somewhat novel, communicate very clearly (particularly what is' for and why you might want to use it, even if that seems obvious to you) and post around mid-morning PST so people can goof off from work to 'research' your interesting new thing.
Another part of the equation is topic and tone. There's no sophisticated algorithm, but it's an eclectic forum, so if your post sounds like pure marketing or self-promo, it will probably not make it far. You need to offer something of value to readers, not to you.
An interesting quirk of the system is that people who upvote or comment on stories don't necessarily read them. A lot of HN discussion boils down to people reacting to the prompt in the subject line. There are publications that learned how to game this. I don't think it's a template worth following, but it sells...
A lot of the rest are people who work in SV or are startup entrepreneurs who want HN to be nothing more than a tech news and startup forum. These are the people who downvote anything they consider "nontechnical."
HN has a lot of good content and discussion, but it would be naive to pretend there aren't business interests at play on HN, and that everyone here is operating in good faith. Even though the guidelines require it.
HN is not a nail. Stop trying to hit it.
Sometimes my friends post on social media platform A "Hey, I've just posted on platform B. Upvotes appreciated."
Or a newsletter will say "please share this post on…"
Or people on Discord / Slack / Matrix will say "people are being mean to me on platform C, where are my defenders at?"
HN feels organic - and is pretty well moderated - but it isn't immune to family & friends giving something an initial boost.
But if no one wants to discuss it, the post will falter.
As for the other levers, it is hard to say. Sometimes the posts I've worked hardest on with the most detail just die a death. But the half-finished thought casually tossed off will Do Numbers. Outrage sometimes works, but it is a fickle friend to tame. Catchy titles aren't clickbait (despite what some people say) but they work best when they are descriptive.
And, finally, people can and do resubmit stuff. What doesn't work at 0900 Monday will be popular at 1700 Tuesday. Why? That's just the way it is.
In the end, it is all luck. But, as the saying goes, the harder you work the luckier you get.
Hacker News is too large. There's too many people and honestly not many hackers. The voting system is silly. What rises to the top is the common denominator, not what is truly interesting to any niche.
Another thing to know: a post with too many comments vs upvotes will be sent to the shadow realm. This is claimed to help deal with hot-button topics, but I've seen many interesting post that suffer the same fate because people have a lot of interesting things to share. I've seen it happen on a post about Forth of all things, with the greybeards coming to chime about something few care about, and it got hidden pretty quickly. Given the numbers, this will be the fate of your post as well.
Only dang knows how this place works. You can get an inkling of its working by being here a while and piecing it together from his comments.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
Recently it's the AI craze: you have a complex problem to solve: "AI can easily do that". You have infrastructure issues: "AI can easily do that". You have issues processing petabytes of data fast and efficiently: "AI can easily solve that". I am getting a ton of bots trying to access my home network: "AI can easily solve that". I am having a hard time falling asleep: "AI". I have a flu: "AI".
In a nutshell, the shiny new toy syndrome is very common so the reception of a product is not a guarantee for success. To give you an example: recently some people(pretty active on here) got in touch with me with regards to an initiative I am a part of: they claimed that they wanted some expertise on the subject I agreed to schedule a call. It turned out to be a sales pitch for yet another product which tries to solve a problem but it does not because the people who built it fundamentally do not understand the problem. Forget the fact that I am not interested in being their client, given that it's a volunteer project and none of the people involved are paid to do it(if anything, we are paying from our own pockets to keep it alive), it was yet another techbro product which tries to build a skyscraper starting from the roof. Except the ground underneath is partially lava, partially a swamp.
I think it is all related to the impostor syndrome: young people have it, they get a bit older and gain confidence. By the time people hit their early to mid 30s, they start realizing that most of the world operates on patches over patches and 2 layers down, no one has a clue what is going on.
Unfortunately due to the enshittification of things people are conditioned to see HN as something to be gamed and leveraged for personal gain now, but in general it's algorithm-less enough, the the mods are strict enough, (thank god) that the type of content here stays pointed towards the original 'hacker' ideals.
Don't tell the mods!
Without effort, anyone can do it. Without passion, it's just work. Without curiosity, it's not hacking.
Probably more than 70% of your post's impact will come from a catchy headline. People will be curious about your headline, and click through. And then, upvote if they find it interesting.
If the post is interesting but the headline isn't, then, well, bad luck.
Once a post gathers enough momentum, it goes to the front page. Then, there are a thousand bots on Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc, that repost articles that got to the front page, and it gathers even more momentum from a large portion of technologists that don't have an HN account but follow these bots.
use prefixes [Tell HN: Ask HN: Show HN:] and suffixes [ [PDF] [video] [1995] ] where needed.
be a human being, dont repost, or post promotional materials for adspace, cultivate a nuts and guts discussion for any project you promote rather than a sales ad.
I personally have no clue why and I kinda like it. Like probably many others I come here to find interesting content and have interesting conversation because there are a lot of genuinely interesting people on this site.
But if you're trying to minmaxing your presence on HN, well good luck.
[0] : https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/what-i-learned-by-being-1...
I bet that this isn’t an exaggeration. Being highly-ranked on HN can probably give a startup a huge advantage, in the hype department.
I guarantee that LLMs are currently being feverishly trained on HN front pages, for the last few years, and we’re gonna be seeing “link farm” sites, specifically designed to rank high on HN.
I enjoy it here. I don’t hang out on any other social media, so this place gets a lot of my time (I’m writing this right now, as I’m working up some tired, to go back to sleep). I’ve spent my entire life, hanging around people that intimidate and inspire me, so this place feels like home.
If it turns into a Dead Internet site, I’ll probably pack it in. I have left a number of sites, over the years. It would make me sad, as I’ve lasted longer here, than anywhere else.
Most of my karma is from comments, not submissions. I like to engage.
The HN audience upvotes it or downvotes it or flags it or ignores it.
From the reaction, you get an impression of the reception of the thing.
That's... it.
How much is it worth for you to know ? ;-)
For instance, there is serious hate here about web interop with classic noscript/basic (x)html browsers (namely basic HTML forms with at best <video> <audio> elements, optional simple CSS, often a document which is a "semantic" 2D html table with proper ids for navigation, encrypted URL parameters are your friends).
And AIs...
A system that somehow allows you to tame AI agents' unruly use of git (is that it?)
I see you did use Show HN, and that didn't work.
What you could have done is email hn@ycombinator.com telling them that your Show HN is not being upvoted. This happens, and usually dang and others mod will take a look and if you're within the guidelines will give it a small boost so it shows up in the main Show HN page. Then you're on your own.
Make sure your catchphrase, or hook is well written, cause most people here will not read past "Make Agents a Safe Collaborator in your App".
Anyways, as others said here. There are no ways to "game" HN. the closest you will manage is what you just did, basically asking for help...
That's the key, ask for help, and people will respond. People are nice, and they are willing to procrastinate their intellect away for free.
The only really opaque thing I’ve found is the anti spam/anti flame war rules but it’s not crazy to keep those secret and I say that as someone who gets temp banned by those rules on here frequently
edit: oh, you should also go to your profile and set showdead to `yes` if you want to see the unfiltered forum. You'll get about 10% controversial opinions and 90% green name accounts posting spam.
Ah and if the poster's name is green in your browser it means they are a very new account
Unless you're building a start up where the potential customers are specifically HN and Reddit readers, get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots.
As lovely and wonderful as the readers of HN and Reddit are, being loved on HN or Reddit means essentially nothing. People here are the magpies of the internet - we love seeing the new shiny thing but that does not tell you it will be a success with the people who might want to buy it. For every Dropbox posted here there are hundreds of Show HN posts that didn't really go anywhere despite having tons of very positive commentary.
If you want to show investors that your start up's product has potential post about it where your customers go and get feedback from people who might give you their money. If you really want to prove your start up has potential, sell to those people and actually get their money. If you can get a sale based on your prototype/proof-of-concept/MVP product that is worth more than a million "Yeah, looks ace, I'd buy that if it was <price that's far too low>." posts from us.
Surely idiot investors are the easiest to get money from?
I played inscryption (a really good game) and magpie had the sigil of being able to take any card from the deck and oh my, it was a beauty seeing a magpie or the sigil because that meant that I could then get any overpowered card I had from the deck.
I am sure people might not understand it if they haven't played the game but everytime I hear magpie, Its almost obligatory for me to mention inscryption. (also the same goes for stoat and ouroborous too)
That said, it also often happen that you share something and it is not picked up, even though after 10 years I think I can predict what HN loves. Sometimes a repost after 2 days will hit the front page, certainly not always.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Like the person creating coloring pages from images using Stable Diffusion. Many HN users would just do it themselves, but many parents have no idea how to do that.
Makes me wonder how many potentially successful businesses never get built, because too many people are trying to build the next big YC project with AI or whatever tech is hype today.
More likes “claim” to do it themselves. Commenting on the Internet is easy. Making effort is not.
> Makes me wonder how many potentially successful businesses never get built, because too many people are trying to build the next big YC project
The can do it yourself crowd will still claim anything can be done themselves no matter big or small.
> “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”
From my experience, both HN and Reddit have the worst traffic. I got "tens of thousands" of visitors from both with exactly zero conversion. I am now getting a few hundreds a month from Google and other sources and the conversion rate is roughly 20-25%. So pretty much not worth it to pursue HN/Reddit for your startup though your mileage would probably vary.
I'd use HackerNews for what it is, a news site for casual/mixed information with sometimes interesting discussions. You could have much better levers in other places.
- the older it is, the less score
- the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score
- penalties reduce the score ( eg. By moderator)
How it works for the end-user:
- People browsing in newest, make it visible in the main page.
- Most people see the main page
Result: interesting topics go to the main page
Unless this has changed, I don't think comments contribute positively to the score. Apparently they (used to?) contribute negatively if there are more comments than upvotes and the number of comments exceeds some threshold. See e.g. this very old article: https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall...
> In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this.
Good: "Why I used Postgres to write a web app"
Money. A spot as US citizen to get into startup school.
Money. An investment from a noble mind to another noble mind.
Money. Pass information to fellows at YC (who are from a different domain, see YC as a cool place) they crowd and promote (seems organic)
Money. Well, then the product or the tech fades, because its a bloatware.
They retry the same thing again with next batch of people. Keeps the forum running. The maintainers get retired or really tired.
Readers. I have seen this one before. Reader. Well, now, you are old
If there is one thing to note, it’s that obvious self-promotion is not good. Technical details are more interesting than sales pitches.
I found out, the other day, that if you post too many comments in too short a time (also undocumented) your final comment is deleted (sorry, you just lose it) instantly with a somewhat snarky message about how you post too much.
I am a little mystified about what community Hacker News serves. It doesn't seem to be the kind of hackers I grew up with (fiercely skeptical, a la 2600 magazine), because, as one example, skepticism about AI or self-driving vehicles is generally downvoted.
Not so much Hacker News as Next Shiny Toy News.
Even so, I know of no better way to discover interesting tools and trends than Hacker News.
But the reason they won't tell you is that the entire reason it works is because you don't know.