Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 77 posts

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#11

Post by willvarfar »

kijin wrote: post #9
rtisticrahul wrote: post #2

My experience with HN has been much better than with Reddit. In reddit, even good posts get down ratings a lot of time. The one thing i like about hacker news is your posts still have 1 point minimum even if others dont like it, whereas in reddit you fall down to 0 points which makes you feel discouraging sometimes.

A lot of downvotes on reddit are actually inserted by the system, accompanied by the same number of upvotes to balance them out. This is supposed to be some sort of anti-spam anti-troll measure, though I'm not sure how that even works. Anyway, the upshot is that you never know the true number of downvotes you got. This can be discouraging for people who don't know about computer-generated phantom votes.

What bugs me more is that the numbers jump all over the place if you refresh the page. Even the number of comments seems out of sync.

That CAP gets so much in the way is irritating. Its like stackoverflow used to be a while ago.

You can make big sites that don't have such laggy BASE. I guess not with the reddit infrastructure perhaps.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#12

Post by chrisacky »

Yesterday, I posted an article on HackerNews. Its received 62k views in total so far. HackerNews was the site that kicked off all of the view counts and it quickly jumped to the top spot #1.

After it reached the top spot, I thought I would also post it on Reddit. It didn't get a single upvote. It's the third time that a story of mine has made it to the front page of HackerNews and then not received a single visitor on Reddit. In the future I don't think it is worth bothering.

Ultimately, 100% of the traffic that I received, would not of happened if it weren't for the upvotes on HackerNews, because from these upvotes everyone started tweeting about it. It received 900 tweets in total.

Here was some of the highlights.

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.chrisacky.com/githu...

(The highest it went to was 800 concurrent users).

I'm guessing 60k for an article within 24 hours is a lot!

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#13

Post by chrisacky »

nikcub wrote: post #6

No mention of Techmeme? I'll add that the best way of getting picked up by other bloggers is first Techmeme (not the largest audience but definitely the most influential in tech) and second HN. I've had blog posts pick up their traffic peaks 2-3 days after they were posted as the route was techmeme -> other tech blogs -> mainstream media

What's the proceedure for getting included on Techmeme?

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#14

Post by nikcub »

chrisacky wrote: post #13
nikcub wrote: post #6

No mention of Techmeme? I'll add that the best way of getting picked up by other bloggers is first Techmeme (not the largest audience but definitely the most influential in tech) and second HN. I've had blog posts pick up their traffic peaks 2-3 days after they were posted as the route was techmeme -> other tech blogs -> mainstream media

What's the proceedure for getting included on Techmeme?

Good question. A combination of a few things:

+ Attach yourself to a story cluster if a relevant one is already there by linking to a source post

+ `tip @techmeme ` on twitter

+ Message the editors on twitter

+ Make sure your feed validates, can be autodiscovered etc.

+ Techmeme can discover stories based on retweet counts, so make sure the same canonical URL is being retweeted and favorited from the post, from twitter, disqus etc.

+ Post interesting things frequently enough that you become a source that is crawled by Techmeme

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#15

Post by nikcub »

willvarfar wrote: post #7
nikcub wrote: post #6

No mention of Techmeme? I'll add that the best way of getting picked up by other bloggers is first Techmeme (not the largest audience but definitely the most influential in tech) and second HN. I've had blog posts pick up their traffic peaks 2-3 days after they were posted as the route was techmeme -> other tech blogs -> mainstream media

wow, never heard of it; thank you :) so what about dzone?

I have never submitted my own posts to DZone, but they have been submitted by others. It isn't in my top10 referrers. My impression is that most of the audience there is Java developers looking for technical posts

Being the first to submit it to delicious is also a good idea, with good tags. Whoever submits it first their title will be the prevailing title for the post with future re-posts, so it is a good idea to be the first to do it and set your own title before somebody bastardizes it (this is the reason why I submit my own posts to HN)

Submitting to Google+ is also a good idea since it is a very good way to get the Google crawler to visit the page and index it.

My own routine after I publish a post that I think may be interesting to others is HN, twitter, delicious and Google+.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#16

Post by chrisacky »

nikcub wrote: post #14
chrisacky wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the proceedure for getting included on Techmeme?

Good question. A combination of a few things: + Attach yourself to a story cluster if a relevant one is already there by linking to a source post + `tip @techmeme ` on twitter + Message the editors on twitter + Make sure your feed validates, can be autodiscovered etc. + Techmeme can discover stories based on retweet counts, so make sure the same canonical URL is being retweeted and favorited from the post, from twitt…

Good advice. I wondered why/how I got included on Techmeme before. I would assume it is based on "Techmeme can discover stories based on retweet counts,".

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#17

Post by nikcub »

chrisacky wrote: post #12

Yesterday, I posted an article on HackerNews. Its received 62k views in total so far. HackerNews was the site that kicked off all of the view counts and it quickly jumped to the top spot #1. After it reached the top spot, I thought I would also post it on Reddit. It didn't get a single upvote. It's the third time that a story of mine has made it to the front page of HackerNews and then not received a single visitor o…

> It didn't get a single upvote.

that is because it is in the spam filter. you need to message the moderators.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#18

Post by nikcub »

chrisacky wrote: post #16
nikcub wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. A combination of a few things: + Attach yourself to a story cluster if a relevant one is already there by linking to a source post + `tip @techmeme ` on twitter + Message the editors on twitter + Make sure your feed validates, can be autodiscovered etc. + Techmeme can discover stories based on retweet counts, so make sure the same canonical URL is being retweeted and favorited from the post, from twitt…

Good advice. I wondered why/how I got included on Techmeme before. I would assume it is based on "Techmeme can discover stories based on retweet counts,".

TM takes hints from a lot of sources - including HN. It has 30k+ sources that it directly crawls itself as well, and uses a lot of different hints to work out what is popular. The biggest hint to a big story is inbound links from other blogs that are also sources, and from there things like popularity on social media

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#19

Post by nikcub »

kijin wrote: post #8

> The per-page time is actually quite high; often over 5 minutes on average for a lot of my stories even when its a big crowd. I suspect some subtle misreading of Google Analytics on my part, or else people might actually be reading the whole thing carefully!? That might be because a lot of people do what I do: keep the article open while browsing comments on HN or Reddit, and switch back and forth between the two ta…

This is why I wrote my own datapoint gathering script (I started it while at Techcrunch, curious about who scrolls down to comments, etc.).

It measures body focus, number of times unfocused, total focus time, scroll position, scroll rate and a bunch of other things.

It isn't completely working cross-browser yet, but it is close and useful enough where for Safari and Chrome visitors I can see how far down the page they are scrolling and how long the page is in focus for.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#20

Post by chrisacky »

nikcub wrote: post #17
chrisacky wrote: post #12

Yesterday, I posted an article on HackerNews. Its received 62k views in total so far. HackerNews was the site that kicked off all of the view counts and it quickly jumped to the top spot #1. After it reached the top spot, I thought I would also post it on Reddit. It didn't get a single upvote. It's the third time that a story of mine has made it to the front page of HackerNews and then not received a single visitor o…

> It didn't get a single upvote. that is because it is in the spam filter. you need to message the moderators.

O right. How did you determine that? To be honest I'm not a redditor. It's not a site that I visit, so I don't understand how it works.
Post reply on HN