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How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

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

#81

Post by rrdharan »

inopinatus wrote: post #61
robust-cactus wrote: post #22

Ok so, different take - if this what people call "gaming the system" I'm all for it. All this article says is that hackernews likes interesting, informative posts that actually tell a real story. And I for one am here for that all day. So yes, everyone take this strategy and make great content.

On the one hand, sure, it’s a kinda like that Mission Accomplished xkcd. On the other hand, the parable of Frogstar World B warns against self-reinforcing focus on a local maxima at the expense of diversity. Fortunately I doubt we’re at risk of passing the Marketing Content Event Horizon just yet

Re: Mission Accomplished, that's https://xkcd.com/810/ and indeed it was the first thing that came to mind when reading GP's comment.

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

#82

Post by dang »

hamallama wrote: post #59
burnished wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, what sort of answer are you expecting? Your post reads as vaguely accusatory to me - like you're implying that messes are being left intentionally

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 no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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

#83

Post by dang »

marketingLizard wrote: post #48
dang wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How long do shill posts last before they've been taken care of?

I'm not sure I understand your question. Sometimes they get "taken care of" instantly by software. Sometimes it takes moderators minutes or hours to see them and "take care of" them. Other times we don't see it and an email from a user asks us to look into it, which we do. That can take a bit longer because there's an extra hop in the path.

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

#84

Post by theGnuMe »

shever73 wrote: post #5

Sorry in advance for the grumpy response, but I hate articles like this and I detest the manipulation of an organic voting mechanism for self-promotion. I know this is the Internet we have to live with, but this kind of stuff just makes it a worse place to be.

It's not any better in the comment section either.... yet we keep coming back.

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

#87

Post by theGnuMe »

YY-EN40P wrote: post #85

As an English non-native, I can't reproduce the way to create an article in 1-2 hours. Can you guys do it easily? Anyway, their strategy is one of the popular ways of content marketing. But each step has something new in detail. Good takeaways!

I think there are a few ways to make this scale using chatgpt and perhaps a human to review/edit rather than write.

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

#89

Post by UncleEntity »

roenxi wrote: post #57
jsnell wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ...since it hopefully makes some HN readers a bit more aware that they're being played. How are they being played? There isn't any deception here. The plan Iron Brands touts is literally "submit interesting articles first". That is what people are trying to upvote.

Sounds to me like they’re scraping the submission pool and “front running” with their “dog whistle detector” chatbot in order to get people to read their marketing paragraph tacked on to the end of the article.

Providing liquidity to the news market as the quaints would say.

If they were doing original research or scraping the web to bring stuff here, fine, good for them. If all they’re doing is repackaging already submitted articles in order to drive traffic to their website then, IDK?

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

#90

Post by YY-EN40P »

theGnuMe wrote: post #87
YY-EN40P wrote: post #85

As an English non-native, I can't reproduce the way to create an article in 1-2 hours. Can you guys do it easily? Anyway, their strategy is one of the popular ways of content marketing. But each step has something new in detail. Good takeaways!

I think there are a few ways to make this scale using chatgpt and perhaps a human to review/edit rather than write.

>To be relevant for HN, you can’t just copy/paste the news item.

Yeah, some parts are perhaps copied/pasted. As you say, their tips include the way to shorten the time of creating an article. That should be the reason they expressed not "write an article" but "create an article".

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