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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

#61

Post by Gustomaximus »

sohkamyung wrote: post #57

Is there a breakdown based on the rough IP location of the people who submits articles? I suspect that HN is also biased towards users in the western hemisphere; so much so that when people from East Asia (like me) post or comment, it is comparatively harder to accumulate points as our posting time is out of sync with when the majority of HN users will see them. I suppose one way out of this is to post when my local…

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com

https://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=hacker%20news

Not sure how accurate Alexa is. Generally between India, China, Australia and Indonesia they must pull a fair size audience.

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

#62

Post by loup-vaillant »

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.

HN is bigger than /r/programming. The subject matter is broader, and there are more submissions. Getting to the front page here is harder.

Second, new posts aren't even ranked before they get some upvotes, so they only appear on the "new" page. Not everyone looks at "new". The crowd that promote new stuff to the front page is not the same crowd that upvote stuff that's already on the front page. Some apparent randomness could come from this difference.

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

#63

Post by PhantomGremlin »

madeofpalk wrote: post #56
minimaxir wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also, your post will get weighted down if it contains certain words or is from a certain domain. I believe at one point 'NSA' got you penalised (due to the high number of NSA links coming in at one point in time), and Medium posts have a tougher time getting onto the front page (due to the lower signal:noise ratio I guess).

from a certain domain

There's more than a bit of leftist elitism at work. E.g. I once made the mistake of submitting something from breitbart.com. It never appeared in 'new'.

When I'm logged in, it shows me that I've submitted 5 items. Examining my submissions anonymously only shows 4 items. Perhaps there are 5 if someone has 'showdead' on?

Putin's external propaganda site, rt.com, is OK, heaven forbid that Breitbart be afforded that same privilege.

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

#64

Post by PhantomGremlin »

ben_jones wrote: post #51
minimaxir wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also I think there is something to be said about the comments section of the post. I rarely up vote anything, and if I do it's usually an afterthought after I've read a good discussion in the comments. I've also caught myself on multiple occasions up-voting a submission after I made a comment on it, simply so that my comment would become more visible and be up-voted. I think there are a lot of intricacies involved in…

I frequently upvote submissions that have good comments, even if the article is not-so-good. There really should be two different upvotes, one for submissions the other for comments.

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

#65

Post by madeofpalk »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #63
madeofpalk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, your post will get weighted down if it contains certain words or is from a certain domain. I believe at one point 'NSA' got you penalised (due to the high number of NSA links coming in at one point in time), and Medium posts have a tougher time getting onto the front page (due to the lower signal:noise ratio I guess).

from a certain domain There's more than a bit of leftist elitism at work. E.g. I once made the mistake of submitting something from breitbart.com. It never appeared in 'new'. When I'm logged in, it shows me that I've submitted 5 items. Examining my submissions anonymously only shows 4 items. Perhaps there are 5 if someone has 'showdead' on? Putin's external propaganda site, rt.com, is OK, heaven forbid that Breitbart…

I think the simpler reason is for a similar reasons as to why Medium get's penalised by the algo - links from Breitbart (and Medium) generate less useful discussions than other sites, thus they must 'work harder' to 'earn' their place on the front page.

Similar to the 'flame war detection' that flags posts with more comments than (up)votes.

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

#66

Post by [deleted] »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #33
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…

Unless I read it wrong, the analysis says early-Saturday-morning on the US East Coast is the optimal submission time? >here are a few additional notes before everyone starts submitting their blog posts and marketing pieces to HN on weekday mornings

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