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When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

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Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#11

Post by jmiserez »

fredley wrote: post #5
readcodelearn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah sorry, it should be EST, updated the article to say that :)

Great stuff, but please normalise to UTC in future. Everyone (reading this) knows their own offset from UTC and can probably makes sense of the data directly in that format. For anything else I have to go and lookup the offset between that timezone and mine.

(Disclaimer: I'm in Europe)

For a website with a US centric audience, I think it makes perfect sense to use a US timezone: The graphs match up well with the sleep/wake patterns in the EST timezone. This makes interpreting the data a bit easier, i.e you can easily tell that there is a morning rush, a lunch rush, etc. (although interestingly, the HN audience doesn't seem to have well-defined break hours as there is just one large peak per day).

Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#13

Post by sillysaurus3 »

minimaxir wrote: post #9

As someone who has looked into this area for Reddit and HN data, here are a few additional notes before everyone starts submitting their blog posts and marketing pieces to HN on weekday mornings: 1) After everything, the analysis is probabilistic. You are not guaranteed to get onto the front page just by submitting on at a high-probability time. 2) There are game-theoric implications; the more people submitting at a…

The way to get onto the front page is to gratify your own curiosity, and then tell people about it. This article, for example.

Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#14

Post by minimaxir »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #13
minimaxir wrote: post #9

As someone who has looked into this area for Reddit and HN data, here are a few additional notes before everyone starts submitting their blog posts and marketing pieces to HN on weekday mornings: 1) After everything, the analysis is probabilistic. You are not guaranteed to get onto the front page just by submitting on at a high-probability time. 2) There are game-theoric implications; the more people submitting at a…

The way to get onto the front page is to gratify your own curiosity, and then tell people about it. This article, for example.

To paraphrase the original article that inspired the OP, the Hacker News front page is not a meritocracy. There are optimizations that make your submission more likely to be upvoted (a simple one being a clickbait title). It is worth noting that this submission would have different behavior with the original title "You only need 3 votes to play, and other facts about the Hacker News frontpage." (and apparently it was just changed to that, and penalized?)

That's also why a good moderation team is necessary and important; to fix submissions which are not inherently good, and to boost submissions which are not inherently bad.

Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#15

Post by forrestthewoods »

HN is frustrating. I've had two blog posts hit #1 in r/programming recently. Neither got more than 2 points on HN.

I could be wrong but I think HN is more random than Reddit. Reddit has lots of randomness of course. But my gut says that escaping New on HN is harder and less predictable.

Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#16

Post by sillysaurus3 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #15

HN is frustrating. I've had two blog posts hit #1 in r/programming recently. Neither got more than 2 points on HN. I could be wrong but I think HN is more random than Reddit. Reddit has lots of randomness of course. But my gut says that escaping New on HN is harder and less predictable.

So submit them again, if they're interesting. That's both allowed and encouraged here.

Use your judgement though. It's a privilege to be able to do this. Three times over the course of a few days is probably fine. Four is probably too many.

Re: When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

#20

Post by Chris2048 »

I wish there was post notification on HN :-/

I also think that people shouldn't post small projects that don't belong to them - If a project/site author wants to be on HN, send them an email and suggest it. They should pick their "release" date, and be prepared for HN traffic.

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