> No self-promotion or any CTA’s in the text What is a "CTA"?
"Call To Action" (= "sign up now!" etc)
How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
11–20 of 133 posts
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#12> You can post multiple times: HN understands that quality posts can go unnoticed, ...
Yes, anecdata: A number of my own highest-quality finds have sink with barely a ripple on the "new" page.
> ... so you can try the same post again. Don’t overdo it. I would say max 2 or 3 times.
Most legit posters have better uses for their remaining lifetime minutes of brain activity than to game HN in such a tedious exercise.
Various software mitigations to recover credit for otherwise lost quality posts occur to me, but the coding effort looks substantial.
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#13Vouched for and upvoted because I think it's important for readers here to see how much effort goes into creating posts that game the system. I think it's better for these strategies to be known than hidden. It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread. There's a definite tension between the rule of not accusing other users of being shills and the reality that…
There’s a silent part of that rule: if you suspect a shill, gather the evidence and present it to dang via email.
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#14Vouched for and upvoted because I think it's important for readers here to see how much effort goes into creating posts that game the system. I think it's better for these strategies to be known than hidden. It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread. There's a definite tension between the rule of not accusing other users of being shills and the reality that…
Right, I'd say that this post has more value than any of the repetitive content marketing these folks churned out for a few years, since it hopefully makes some HN readers a bit more aware that they're being played.
But the interesting question is: why did they write this article?
Is it just that the jig is up, and their one weird trick no longer works as well as it did? Did they get asked to cut it out by the HN moderators? It seems plausible given how many recent submissions to this domain appear to be auto-dead. Do they just think HN readers will forget about this article, and upvote their next bit of content marketing anyway?
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#15Vouched for and upvoted because I think it's important for readers here to see how much effort goes into creating posts that game the system. I think it's better for these strategies to be known than hidden. It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread. There's a definite tension between the rule of not accusing other users of being shills and the reality that…
Right, I'd say that this post has more value than any of the repetitive content marketing these folks churned out for a few years, since it hopefully makes some HN readers a bit more aware that they're being played. But the interesting question is: why did they write this article? Is it just that the jig is up, and their one weird trick no longer works as well as it did? Did they get asked to cut it out by the HN mod…
Reminds me of the scene with the Mortgage Brokers in The Big Short - "They're not confessing, they're bragging"
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#16(Yes, I acknowledge that this stuff is hard, and that a lot of effort is going into it.) It feels like HN moderation is mostly focused on getting the comments interesting, not about getting the stories interesting. HN needs to step up its game here, IMO. There's way too much gamed crap reaching the front page. It seems especially bad during European office hours when the Californians are asleep.
What are some examples of posts that looked like gamed crap to you?
I wouldn't say moderation is more focused on interesting comments than interesting stories - at least not consciously or intentionally.
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#17Vouched for and upvoted because I think it's important for readers here to see how much effort goes into creating posts that game the system. I think it's better for these strategies to be known than hidden. It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread. There's a definite tension between the rule of not accusing other users of being shills and the reality that…
There’s a silent part of that rule: if you suspect a shill, gather the evidence and present it to dang via email.
Yes please.
Edit: actually not so silent - it's the latter part of this guideline from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
It's part of the contract we have with HN users - we ask them not to post this stuff in the threads, but in return we always look into cases that they report to us directly.
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well then again, the articles they write and post (seem?) To have value, as they are written "with reaserach, without bs" and on newsworthy subjects... I see this less as "gaming HN" than "realising what the niche is" and fulfilling the niche. I guess I'm fine with someone posting first about a subject that will be there anyway? Maybe I'm not seeing something.
It’s possible (likely) that I’m not seeing something too. I read the article in the spirit of the headline, which is basically: we wrote a bot to tell us stuff that would do well on HN so we can shill our/our clients’ stuff. In other words, HN becomes an echo chamber of rephrased news articles recycled into commercial blogspam.
Well, contrary to what was written today in a comment I almost replied to [0] it's more hacker news than hacker news [1].
So they didn't really hack HN, they merely provided content HN likes and did at the right time. I wonder if they could hack it more by only providing divisive content that feeds on outrage. That'd bring comments and points but most likely no new clients or conversions.
Oh, and I have a good example of that ! The other days there was a submission about a font from intel designed for visually deficient programmers. I got curious and installed it then I started thinking about ligatures in code, googled a bit and read https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fon...
I found the article interesting and decided to submit it but when pasting the title I thought "uh, with a title like that, there's going to be some strong reactions/opinions" and indeed the top comment thread is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35926574
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927503
>> Can someone explain me why people post links to Wikipedia articles without any context?
> For the exact same reason people post links to other things, it's interesting. It's always been more "hacker" than "news" here.*
[1] It's branding/marketing/groupthink...
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#19Vouched for and upvoted because I think it's important for readers here to see how much effort goes into creating posts that game the system. I think it's better for these strategies to be known than hidden. It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread. There's a definite tension between the rule of not accusing other users of being shills and the reality that…
the rule against calling other people shills is the worst part of hackernews. Skepticism is important, and important to share. I have never been anything but grateful to read a comment pointing out that another comment was obviously a shill. Perhaps I have been embarrassed for not seeing the obvious truth, but always grateful.
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#20So provide quality content, that readers like, in a timely manner.
That's not hacking.
That's how HN is supposed to work.