How to Get Upvoted on Hacker News

Relevant - Effects of title length on upvotes gained by a [Reddit] post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/durndj/eff...

The easiest way is to just email and ask if a story is a good fit.

I don’t think that will scale, but if a story is legitimately interesting and your email is short, you might find it’s given preference.

The full-time goal of HN is to stay interesting at every timestep. A lot of the reason people’s interesting stories don’t get upvoted is that there are so many interesting stories to talk about each day, and there are 30 slots on the front page. Interesting discussions also take time to foster, so you have to give content a little bit of time to accumulate well-written comments, which necessarily appear 30 minutes to several hours after hitting the front page.

Ultimately it’s an interesting intellectual exercise to analyze HN like this, but probably not too useful. The data hides the underlying fact that HN is fine-tuned to be interesting. Just be interesting, and eventually you’ll get a slot. It’s as easy and as hard as that.

I claim that pretty much any post with "Hacker News" in the title will attract attention. And after all, attention from others what we all want, right? (I'm too lazy to verify this, but at least it sounds plausible.)

There are times of high usage as evident from analysis of front page, and new page postings, let this read as "more users on the board make more votes possible for any one comment or submission".

Be genuine. find things that are interesting to you, and are willing to discuss with others.

HN is like the digital/intellectual version of walking into a fitness club and seeing the different levels of expertise and the specialty activities, with volunteer training coaches. Posts of tabloid-like prurient interest, or gratuitously illicit content usually dont do well on HN

Must we gameify everything? Reverse engineering serendipity is such a miserable way to think/exist.