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Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#71

Post by wickedsight »

onion2k wrote: post #51

When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.” Unless you're building a start up where the potential customers are specifically HN and Reddit readers, get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots. As lovely and wonderful as the readers of HN and Reddit are, being loved on HN or Reddit means essentially nothing . Peopl…

Also, people here are probably too technically inclined to understand what normal people want. If you look at the $500/mo side projects thread, there's a bunch of projects where HN would probably say: 'but anyone can do that themselves using X'.

Like the person creating coloring pages from images using Stable Diffusion. Many HN users would just do it themselves, but many parents have no idea how to do that.

Makes me wonder how many potentially successful businesses never get built, because too many people are trying to build the next big YC project with AI or whatever tech is hype today.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#72

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

antognini wrote: post #23

I've found that there can be a lot of randomness for what makes the front page. Not too many people read the "New" page and articles drop off it pretty quickly, so it can be hard for a niche article to attract the handful of votes it needs to appear on the front page. (Though there is a "second chance" feature which helps to ameliorate this issue.) So there's a lot of randomness to what makes it onto the front page.…

I've found that there is a snowball effect too

If someone has less votes and its still something I find interesting, I am more critic of the whole situation to upvote

But if someone already has 400 upvotes and is on the top of the site, I will look more into it with ("woah a lot of people upvoted, lets see why" and then read the comments and some of the comments are really brilliant that it becomes the reason why I upvote the post itself too

I am sure that hackernews doesnt really recommend it but I do feel like its something that I do subconsciously that I have observed and wanted to share. It does feel like random stuff but still in a way which still makes sense for the whole ethos of hackernews.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#73

Post by re-thc »

wickedsight wrote: post #71
onion2k wrote: post #51

When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.” Unless you're building a start up where the potential customers are specifically HN and Reddit readers, get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots. As lovely and wonderful as the readers of HN and Reddit are, being loved on HN or Reddit means essentially nothing . Peopl…

Also, people here are probably too technically inclined to understand what normal people want. If you look at the $500/mo side projects thread, there's a bunch of projects where HN would probably say: 'but anyone can do that themselves using X'. Like the person creating coloring pages from images using Stable Diffusion. Many HN users would just do it themselves, but many parents have no idea how to do that. Makes me…

> Many HN users would just do it themselves

More likes “claim” to do it themselves. Commenting on the Internet is easy. Making effort is not.

> Makes me wonder how many potentially successful businesses never get built, because too many people are trying to build the next big YC project

The can do it yourself crowd will still claim anything can be done themselves no matter big or small.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#75

Post by csomar »

It is not clear what exactly you are looking for?

> “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”

From my experience, both HN and Reddit have the worst traffic. I got "tens of thousands" of visitors from both with exactly zero conversion. I am now getting a few hundreds a month from Google and other sources and the conversion rate is roughly 20-25%. So pretty much not worth it to pursue HN/Reddit for your startup though your mileage would probably vary.

I'd use HackerNews for what it is, a news site for casual/mixed information with sometimes interesting discussions. You could have much better levers in other places.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#76

Post by asim »

To echo what dang said in the thread. It's a place to hang out and learn about new things. Or sometimes old things. It's news, it's history. All with a tech skew. I've had this account since 2008. In that time I've used it in many different ways, including getting stuff onto the front page. Honestly trying to game it doesn't work. Post something people genuinely find interesting and it will make it to the front page and in the case it doesn't sometimes the mod will see that and think it should get another shot.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#79

Post by lukan »

keiferski wrote: post #46
PaulRobinson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree with you more. The internet has, to borrow the word of the moment, become enshittified, and people think that's "normal". People accept that platforms should be centralised, and that they should harvest your data in order to sell it to adtech companies who will then feed it to an industry that learns in real-time how to prey on your darkest fears to sell you things you don't need but might make you fee…

YouTube is easily the best “social network” in terms of having high-quality content with minimal manipulation. And I definitely consider it my main form of media consumption. You just have to curate your feed and add stuff to playlists, not watch whatever is on the logged-out default home page.

What? You have to do a lot of curation and fighting the service itself (hiding shorts) to get to a bearable level. And I did not spend hours clicking things I don't like. I mostly just watch movies/clips I want, but my recommendations are full of clickbait manipulative garbage. So yes, one can find jewels in it - but only if digging through the garbage first.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#80

Post by esperent »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #6

> " When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: 'Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.' " ... " If so, what are the real levers, and what do people consistently misunderstand? " There are no "levers". People come to HN to discuss nerdy topics and those that have come to HN to help make those discussions more informed and interesting are welcome. Anyone who comes t…

> There are no "levers".

Everyone wants to believe that their community doesn't have levers. But this is just wishful thinking, ego talking. Of course HN has levers, of course the community here can be manipulated.

The easiest way I can see would be to frame a helpful, curious question to which your service just happens to be the answer. So then you most an Ask HN like "can anyone help me to understand why people do X" followed by a few sentences of your thoughts, then at the end say "I've been working on a service to help with this but we don't seem to be getting much to traction, here's a link".

Another approach would be "nerd sniping". Post your site but don't mention anything about what it's for and instead say "I'm having a problem with SSR rendering with NextJS on my site" or something like that. You'll get massive engagement.

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