What being on the front page of Hacker News does for our bottom line

Post by ohashi » Thu, Mar 08, 2012, 5:44 PM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #12

> During that period, there were 24,826 first time visitors to any of our sites who we could identify as having first gotten to us via Hacker News (in all, we received more like 105,000 unique visitors from Hacker News, but many of those were repeat visitors). 97 of those visitors signed up, with more than 85% of them electing the free plan. Left unsaid: how many of the 105,000 unique HN visitors are customers? Also…

Post by rhizome » Thu, Mar 08, 2012, 5:49 PM UTC

victork2 wrote: post #41

robgough wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's disagree-ing, and then there's talking in circles. As you point out - if they're being voted up, then surely they have a place. I'm just tired of seeing the "is this relevant" discussion on every single one. I find it no different than having someone go "by a Windows PC" on every Apple post, and vice versa. I agree hate is a strong word, and I used it only a short-hand description of what I meant. I'm not ove…

I get you. But here's the catch, and that's also valid for HN: Is crowd validation always the best measurement of the quality of an article? I agree there are a lot of running in circle conversations on HN. Like "Apache is slow, use Node.js", or its contrary "Node.js is bad, use {insert something else}". On HN there's a great deal of know-it-all attitude and most of the posts could be summarized by "Your choices of X…

Post by jhowell » Thu, Mar 08, 2012, 5:51 PM UTC

Post by cooldeal » Thu, Mar 08, 2012, 5:52 PM UTC

huggyface wrote: post #16

rglover wrote: post #10

They should have just smiled at the naysayers and went on with their day. To post an entire article on the negativity of one community seems unfocused. My only question is: why? Disclosure: I'm a big fan of 37signals. This is kind of a surprise.

It isn't even the negative of one community, but rather the negativity of a small group of people within that overarching community. People need to realize that sources of content almost always come in waves here on HN -- when someone makes an erudite post that makes it to the front page, there are a lot of people who will watch that source looking to repeat that success. And then you'll get the voters who'll vote it…

Post by cooldeal » Thu, Mar 08, 2012, 5:54 PM UTC

recoiledsnake wrote: post #44

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #43

So it's a post on the front page of HN about how much it doesn't matter about being on the front page of HN? I love meta and recursion, but that's a little too meta even for me. I don't have anything against the guys at 37Signals. Seems like they are doing some cool stuff. They have set themselves up as being awesome as part of their marketing strategy. While sales from HN hits probably don't amount to anything, I ca…

I agree. But what if they made 300K/month off HN, would they be asking HN to upvote posts regardless of merit? The post seems to be a little sour grapey to me but I don't think it's a big deal anyway. Just one more story to ignore on HN's front page. But I personally find their posts(and many others on HN) lacking in objectiveness and follow the below trend: 1) Find something (eg. sharpening pencils), that most compa…