Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#101

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:13 AM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #99

jacquesm wrote: post #47

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 usef…

[flagged]

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?

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#102

Post by baq » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:15 AM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #99

jacquesm wrote: post #47

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 usef…

[flagged]

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.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#103

Post by nobodywillobsrv » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:23 AM UTC

TomasBM wrote: post #96

jacquesm wrote: post #47

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 usef…

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#104

Post by nottorp » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:24 AM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #99

jacquesm wrote: post #47

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 usef…

[flagged]

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#105

Post by lynx97 » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:25 AM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #99

jacquesm wrote: post #47

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 usef…

[flagged]

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?

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#106

Post by kevin061 » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:26 AM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#107

Post by noosphr » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:27 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #47

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 usef…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#108

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:32 AM UTC

baq wrote: post #102

p-e-w wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 sel…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#109

Post by Nevermark » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:34 AM UTC

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #57

dang wrote: post #8

(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…

> If you ( "The royal you"

Or the “you, the great unwashed”. Although there is no rule enforcing mutual exclusion.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#110

Post by sylware » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:35 AM UTC

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 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...