Ask HN: Anyone gained traction on HN *without* any of their friends upvoting? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Anyone gained traction on HN without any of their friends upvoting?

#31

Post by trbecker » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 2:14 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #15

I made all of my front-pages without having any of my friends upvoting.

Also.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone gained traction on HN without any of their friends upvoting?

#32

Post by _delirium » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 4:09 PM UTC

Yes, but my experience is that it's much less likely than it used to be, because /newest churns really fast and gets only a small proportion of total pageviews. So it greatly helps to get the first few upvotes form elsewhere to jumpstart things. My guess is a substantial proportion of frontpage stories got their first few upvotes from somewhere other than people scanning /newest. Not necessarily friends, but perhaps a link on Twitter or an IRC channel.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone gained traction on HN without any of their friends upvoting?

#33

Post by zeynalov » Mon, Feb 06, 2012, 7:24 PM UTC

pknerd wrote: post #30

csomar wrote: post #15

I made all of my front-pages without having any of my friends upvoting.

So you make most of your posts at some particular time?

Doesn't matter. It has to be interesting enough.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone gained traction on HN without any of their friends upvoting?

#34

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 07, 2012, 11:45 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Anyone gained traction on HN without any of their friends upvoting?

#35

Post by jnorthrop » Fri, Feb 10, 2012, 10:57 AM UTC

I find getting to the front page is hit or miss when I submit something from my blog. I only submit stories I think will be interesting to the community but it is really surprising to me which ones make it past the "new" page.

I submitted a story the other day which was dead on-topic for this community and timely and I thought would certainly make it to the homepage here but it got one vote and disappeared. Yet someone submitted a story from my blog some months ago that shocked me anyone cared at all. Finally yesterday I made an "offer" post. I was giving advice away for free and it didn't receive one single vote.

The bottom line is that large groups are fickle and trying to predict the "what" and "why" about the homepage is difficult and largely unproductive.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone gained traction on HN without any of their friends upvoting?

#36

Post by untog » Tue, Feb 14, 2012, 6:22 PM UTC

volaski wrote: post #2

Has anyone submitted their project on HN, and without any friends' help, reached front page? My hope is at least on HN, if your project is cool, it will get traction without asking friends to upvote your entry (which happens a lot most of the times). Am I too idealistic? Please share your story if you used to be a nobody and just posted your project/startup on hacker news, and it got significant traction just because…

Absolutely. I don't know anyone on HN, but my post yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3586260) made it on the front page, I think peaking at #9.

One thing I did that might have helped- I tweeted a link to both the blog post and the HN entry, and was retweeted by MapBox, the makers of the software I was discussing. It didn't generate a ton of traffic, but it might have generated those 3 or 4 upvotes you need to get going.