Yeah, I don’t know how my filesystem watcher made it to the front page either
What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
31–40 of 52 posts
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#32This is a good rundown but misses the biggest thing, random chance . Depending on time of day the your post will stay on page one of "new" for between 20-40 minutes. It needs about 4-6 upvotes in that time to drop onto the bottom of the homepage, and then with that a chance of more eyeballs. Some people skim page two and look for thing with a couple of votes for closer inspection, but the reality is you have that bri…
Oh, thought of another important one to add.
HN post titles have to (mostly) match the title of the page/article. Think carefully how you title your posts so that they are descriptive enough about the post. Short titles, like "why we are awesome", with no lead or indication of topic do very badly.
For GitHub repositories, include a description of the tool along with the name of it in the readme title.
Your page title is your HN post title.
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#33Content that is personally placed there by front tech socialist dang.
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#34I have not cracked the code yet.
I am 99% certain by now, after a decade plus observing it that if one submits a URL one gets into a very competitive race with folks using voting rings or otherwise paid/inauthentic upvoting services.
Luck of the lightning bolt may be a factor too.
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#35This is a good rundown but misses the biggest thing, random chance . Depending on time of day the your post will stay on page one of "new" for between 20-40 minutes. It needs about 4-6 upvotes in that time to drop onto the bottom of the homepage, and then with that a chance of more eyeballs. Some people skim page two and look for thing with a couple of votes for closer inspection, but the reality is you have that bri…
Wow, while I knew about the pool, I didn't know there was a page that actually showed it.
On that note, here[1] is a resource with some more undocumented HN features.
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#36If this is a marketer trying to figure out how to get a product launch to the front page, there are a few errors in their thinking: 1) Show HN is the right answer. End of story. That is how we specifically say to HN, "Look at this thing I made!", regardless of whether you are an established user or new to the site. Just do that. 2) Their goal isn't actually to get "to the front page". Their goal is to get eyes on the…
> 3) Unless their target market is actually the HN crowd... why are they wanting our eyes, anyway?
I was wondering that, too. Investors? Hiring?
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#37“ A blog post from a corporate entity only has a 8% shot at making the FP”
This is not the same as saying 8% of the FP is corp blog posts
Actually stopped reading at this point
Also first post
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#388 of my last 10 blog posts[1] made the front page of HN. Before that, my posts only made the front page infrequently. What changed is I started picking topics and framings which are more appealing to HN readers, and I credit Michael Lynch's course[2] for helping me to do that. He is surely one of the best authorities on what reaches the front page of HN.
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#398 of my last 10 blog posts[1] made the front page of HN. Before that, my posts only made the front page infrequently. What changed is I started picking topics and framings which are more appealing to HN readers, and I credit Michael Lynch's course[2] for helping me to do that. He is surely one of the best authorities on what reaches the front page of HN. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=agwa.name [2] https:…
SEO -> HNO
Re: What gets to the front page of Hacker News?
#40I've got all of HN in SQLite if anyone else wants to play. You'd wanna hydrate into something better.
Share on Torrent maybe? Like 640MiB per year.