It may be a poor analogy but they seem to be doing what marketmakers in the HFT world do for HN up votes!
How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
111–120 of 133 posts
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#112I 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
Other posts weren’t gamed, but just more catered to this audience.
Your example is extremely obvious: I don’t know what a DAW UI is and it isn’t explained in the first sentences of the page and I don’t really bother to put more time into finding out. It doesn’t matter how in-depth the article is if it doesn’t resonate at all with most average HN users.
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#113An alternative title might be "How Hacker News forces marketers to write better content".
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#114[deleted]
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shills don't care about their accounts, just that they spray their message around. Just curious if the silent system works fast enough. For my curiosity, by the way, my account was rate limited. Thanks Dang.
As Operyl correctly said, your account was rate limited because new accounts are subject to rate limits. Btw, could you please not create accounts for every few comments you post? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have…
I never look at the name of the user posting a comment, just at the comment's content. Do people really remember names here? Just such as mine?)
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Other posts weren’t gamed, but just more catered to this audience. Your example is extremely obvious: I don’t know what a DAW UI is and it isn’t explained in the first sentences of the page and I don’t really bother to put more time into finding out. It doesn’t matter how in-depth the article is if it doesn’t resonate at all with most average HN users.
True, people often assume everyone knows their acronyms ...
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#117Earlier 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.
I love that rule. I've gotten called a shill for microsoft many times when I've mentioned some of the cool aspects of their OS design, especially vs Linux. The thing is, I use linux almost exclusively, but for occasional cross platform testing in a vm. I really dislike being called a shill just for recognizing some neat ideas.
But that's just a sign of the other person's low intelligence and laziness (launching into ad hominem instead of putting in the work to attempt to entertain your point of view).
What's more tiring for me is coming up with incessant caveats that no, i don't have anything to do with this company, no, i don't agree with everything they do but they did one cool thing here, etc etc. Make one remark about e.g. Tesla's technology without those massive caveats and a bunch of people will show up and happily hijack your thread onto a bewildering and useless tangent...
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other posts weren’t gamed, but just more catered to this audience. Your example is extremely obvious: I don’t know what a DAW UI is and it isn’t explained in the first sentences of the page and I don’t really bother to put more time into finding out. It doesn’t matter how in-depth the article is if it doesn’t resonate at all with most average HN users.
True, people often assume everyone knows their acronyms ...
While that's perhaps the case, I was under the impression that the HN crown was one that favored research. In this particular case, if I search for "DAW", then the Wikipedia entry is first of the results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_workstation
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#119> 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. Var…
What are some of the high-quality finds that sank without a trace? Maybe we could send repost invites to put them in the second-chance pool! ( https://news.ycombinator.com/pool , explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 )
[deleted]
Re: How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
#120Vouched 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…
> But the interesting question is: why did they write this article?
I'd guess because they're a part of the community and simply want to share their findings. I see no malice here. Having your work (whether writing or a new product) on the front page of HN for a couple hours is a great feeling and gives you a boost of motivation to continue your work.
They did mention the SEO benefits. Nevertheless, they are linking to a post on Indiehackers (not Simple Analytics website) which doesn't help them much in this scenario.
> Do they just think HN readers will forget about this article, and upvote their next bit of content marketing anyway?
As an HN reader, I come here more for comments than the articles themselves. If the article stirs an interesting debate on a topic that I'm interested in, I personally don't care if the authors used some "strategy" to get on the front page or not. Bad and uninteresting spammy content usually doesn't stay on the front page for long.