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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?

#91

Post by lukan »

esperent wrote: post #80
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…

"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"."

Nah, that would be obvious marketing to most. More sneaky would be answering the question with the recommendation from a different account in a way to promote your service and have that upvoted, but that requires more effort and skill I assume.

But in general yes, this community definitely can also be manipulated, but I would say it is one of the hardest to fool. The standard mentality here I actually would rather describe as critical instead of curious, but there is just lots of garbage being pushed and also my curiosity is limited.

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

#93

Post by mithcs »

dang wrote: post #8

(I'm a mod here) It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks. But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are…

dang, what a great answer.

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

#94

Post by lukan »

keiferski wrote: post #83
lukan wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I watch a ton of great content by people that I subscribe to. It's not difficult or complicated to get there. Not sure what else to say.

But you don't agree it took a lot of effort to hide the garbage?

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

#95

Post by throwaway2037 »

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…

Is there an easy way to show top 10 "Show HN" posts (by upvotes and/or comments) in the last one year? That might help this person to see what works on HN. I expect the list to have no obvious patterns except that they are wildly nerdy or unexpectedly useful. To be clear, I am not suggesting this list to make it easier for the original poster to manipulate the HN system. The readers here are way too discerning to be easily fooled by something obviously commercial appearing under the "Show HN" banner.

Two people that come to mind that normally generate an enormous number of upvotes and discussion are blog posts from Alyssa Rosenzweig (Asahi Linux GPU drivers) and Justine Tunney (Cosmopolitan Libc). Both of those projects trigger near-superhuman levels of nerd sniping (https://xkcd.com/356/). Few nerds can resist!

Final note: To me, this question feels like the "uncanny valley" of nerd discussion boards. Can you imagine posting something similar to LWN.net trying to figure out how to get your commercial project featured in a story?

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

#96

Post by TomasBM »

jacquesm wrote: post #47

HN is hard to game on purpose. So stop looking for the levers and participate , that's all there is to it. I've made friends here, have been helped by people on projects that I was busy with, did the reverse, found friends and business partners and spend way too much time. HN is a very interesting slice of the online world, a place that is unlike the rest, sometimes a bit dry but always interesting and extremely usef…

First two sentences are key. The reason why HN is so much better than other fora (IMO) is that the mods don't allow lever-pulling and astroturfing to overtake regular contributions. Yet it's also popular, so you're bound to get some activity on most posts.

Sure, it can be frustrating if you're trying to promote a product or farm karma on posts. But the fact that mostly nobody cares about karma means that you can post something and have it be evaluated on its technical, economic, social merits.

Obviously, there are caveats to this - i.e., anything US- and FAANG-related is bound to get much more activity than otherwise - but the overall atmosphere of HN is refreshing compared to Reddit.

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

#97

Post by throwaway2037 »

esperent wrote: post #80
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…

I love your nerd sniping idea. Literally, I used that same term in my post before I saw yours!

This makes me think of a fun idea: Once a year on HN (April Fool's Day?), we can have a nerd sniping competition where commercial projects try to nerd snipe HN readers with submarine adverts.

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

#98

Post by manuelmoreale »

Years ago I wrote [0] about the lessons I learned by reaching the front page of both HN and Product Hunt and honestly, all these years later, the only thing I can confidently say is that I don't know shit. Sometimes people posts here things I wrote and for one reason or another they gain traction.

I personally have no clue why and I kinda like it. Like probably many others I come here to find interesting content and have interesting conversation because there are a lot of genuinely interesting people on this site.

But if you're trying to minmaxing your presence on HN, well good luck.

[0] : https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/what-i-learned-by-being-1...

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

#99

Post by p-e-w »

jacquesm wrote: post #47

HN is hard to game on purpose. So stop looking for the levers and participate , that's all there is to it. I've made friends here, have been helped by people on projects that I was busy with, did the reverse, found friends and business partners and spend way too much time. HN is a very interesting slice of the online world, a place that is unlike the rest, sometimes a bit dry but always interesting and extremely usef…

[flagged]

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

#100

Post by keiferski »

lukan wrote: post #94
keiferski wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watch a ton of great content by people that I subscribe to. It's not difficult or complicated to get there. Not sure what else to say.

But you don't agree it took a lot of effort to hide the garbage?

Not really, if anything, there is too much stuff I want to watch that is suggested to me.

I suppose if you created an account today you'd be fed a lot of garbage, but I've been watching YouTube often for at least a couple years.

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