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How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

indiehackers.com

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Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

#101

Post by ramraj07 »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #38

I don't think there can be much better praise for a site's moderation approach than someone deciding that creating relevant, high-quality content is the best way to "beat" the algorithm/approach. And someone doing that has certainly earned the right to include "one sentence that is the least salesy you can do" of self-promotion.

Yeah HN is weirdly still amazing at filtering the good stuff. I have submitted things here only when I truly felt it added value and I had something to say, and never bothered to think about anything to optimize. Yet I actually got at least some traction every single time.

It’s quite amazing. I noticed these guys coming in the front page very often too, and while I agree their “hack” seems laudable while also not offending anyone (they’re doing what we are looking for), they seem to forget one more reason why they keep getting traction - the product they sell is absolutely on target to HN audience at an emotional level so people likely upvote due to that reason as well.

Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

#102

Post by youainti »

dang wrote: post #44
ouid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no such thing as "obviously a shill"—I can tell you from years of experience that the vast majority of such accusations crumble instantly on investigation. Commenters are far too quick to hurl them at other commenters. There seems to be a cognitive bias where one's feeling of good faith decreases as the distance between someone else's opinion and one's own increases [1]. If so, then everyone has a "shill thre…

Thank you for that in depth reply. I learned something new by reading it. I guess I had never considered the community and norms aspect to reducing false positives in abuse detection.

Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

#103

Post by kuba_dmp »

nkurz wrote: post #3

Vouched 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…

Also you have companies that "game the system" by just creating great stuff that bring value to this community. Look at Tailscale for example.

You can just do marketing things that are perfectly aligned with the community.

That is a win win imho.

plug: If interested I went into how tailscale does it https://www.developermarkepear.com/blog/developer-marketing-...

Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

#105

Post by justaj »

hakanderyal wrote: post #27

I don't see this post as "hacking" the HN, but in the same vein as the famous "Mission ... accomplished" comic from xkcd[0]. I wish more people produced content like the ones they've mentioned (about an interesting, current topic, with their own take). [0]: https://xkcd.com/810/

On the flipside of this argument, it kind of sucks to submit an awesomely made article [0] which details significant research on the intricacies of DAW UI requirements and have almost no discussion on it because other posts may have been gamed and thus received attention instead of the more organically submitted content.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35922858

Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

#106

Post by bumbledraven »

gumballindie wrote: post #51
nkurz wrote: post #3

Vouched 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…

> It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread. I suspect there may already be openai shills around here. While not using chatgpt for spam they may still be promoting it like mad. Notice there are few alternatives shared and open source models are much less frequently mentioned.

That’s because every model sucks for complicated tasks compared to GPT-4, and no one aside from OpenAI has a model more capable that GPT-3.5.

Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

#108

Post by Paul-Craft »

yuliyp wrote: post #35
ouid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A comment attacking someone for being a shill is expressing skepticism in the most trivial way, and serves to throw a debate into a flamewar rather than actually discussing the flaws of their arguments.

I wouldn't even say it rises to the level of "expressing skepticism" per se. It's just literal ad hominem. Ad hominem is a logical fallacy precisely because a good argument is a good argument regardless of who is presenting it, and likewise a bad argument is bad on its own merits.

There is more that could be said here, but, really, if you take this as your default approach to analysing things you read on the internet, you'll be headed in a good direction the vast majority of the time. It's not a completely black and white thing; for instance one certainly should hold out a healthy level of skepticism if, say, the message and the speaker seem to be completely incongruous, but mostly, let ideas stand on their own.

Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

#109

Post by Paul-Craft »

youainti wrote: post #102
dang wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as "obviously a shill"—I can tell you from years of experience that the vast majority of such accusations crumble instantly on investigation. Commenters are far too quick to hurl them at other commenters. There seems to be a cognitive bias where one's feeling of good faith decreases as the distance between someone else's opinion and one's own increases [1]. If so, then everyone has a "shill thre…

Thank you for that in depth reply. I learned something new by reading it. I guess I had never considered the community and norms aspect to reducing false positives in abuse detection.

Yeah, that was a really interesting comment. I think it would be kinda cool if dang or someone expanded it into more of a blog post on how HN is moderated, or maybe even best practices for community moderation in general.

Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

#110

Post by Paul-Craft »

ramraj07 wrote: post #101
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #38

I don't think there can be much better praise for a site's moderation approach than someone deciding that creating relevant, high-quality content is the best way to "beat" the algorithm/approach. And someone doing that has certainly earned the right to include "one sentence that is the least salesy you can do" of self-promotion.

Yeah HN is weirdly still amazing at filtering the good stuff. I have submitted things here only when I truly felt it added value and I had something to say, and never bothered to think about anything to optimize. Yet I actually got at least some traction every single time. It’s quite amazing. I noticed these guys coming in the front page very often too, and while I agree their “hack” seems laudable while also not off…

> I noticed these guys coming in the front page very often too....

Is less than once a month "very often?" Or do you mean "very often relative to how frequently one would expect a company that makes an alternative to Google Analytics" would make the front page?

I did think it was hilarious that they posted an article showing how to get to the front page of HN in such a way that you can sneak in a quick mention of your product without tripping the community's anti-self promotion bias, while literally did the exact thing they were suggesting doing.

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