Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

The forum tries to not be gameable. If it’s in its ideal state then it works when you have something that is legitimately interesting to the community, although it’s up to the interpreter to decide how well that works.

The only really opaque thing I’ve found is the anti spam/anti flame war rules but it’s not crazy to keep those secret and I say that as someone who gets temp banned by those rules on here frequently

edit: oh, you should also go to your profile and set showdead to `yes` if you want to see the unfiltered forum. You'll get about 10% controversial opinions and 90% green name accounts posting spam.

Ah and if the poster's name is green in your browser it means they are a very new account

If there were “levers” for people to pull to game the site, it would lose all its value and turn into nothing but low-effort self-promotion. I won’t claim to understand everything about HN, but I know that is not in the spirit of the site.

Obviously all of what dang said, but I want to add that I think timing is an additional factor.

If you post when silicon valley wakes up on a weekday, you might get “initial” points faster, which leads to your submission being ranked higher up for a while and being more discoverable.

It‘s clearly manipulated/curated, you can tell my some absolutely shitty content with zero comments and zero engagement ending up and staying on the frontpage for quite a while.

Yeah bro. If you go to YC and do well enough they'll tell you. They'll put you in the second chance pool. They'll tell you not to upvote from the profile page, or from a direct link to the YC story page.

But the reason they won't tell you is that the entire reason it works is because you don't know.