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Comment by ironkeith | Hacker News Reader

I've submitted 18 articles, and 9 have made it to the homepage (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ironkeith). I am certainly not a power user, and I don't have a circle of friends who quickly upvote my submissions to game the system. So far as I can tell, people use the new page, and interesting articles make the home page.

That said, I also think it's really important to ensure that the title you submit is properly phrased. The articles that have received the most votes have inevitably been the ones I put some time into rewording to appeal to HN users.

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the stuff of yours that got voted up, is what you found online at popular sites. The reason it bypasses the death, is that other people try to submit it too, at which point it gets 1 extra upvote.

I'm more speaking for the people who write their own stuff(sivers, asmartbear etc). Who spend 2-3 hours putting an interesting article together, only to have it die in the new bin.

For example, I get asked all the time how I got my site to 35K visits in 2 months. And I'd love to share. But I always put it off because I know there is a 90% chance it'll never get off the new page.

Why should I spend 3-5 hours putting that article together with graphs and data, if I know for a fact that there is 99% chance that it'll die. I got a site to run, I can't throw away my time like that.

In fact the only articles of mine that actually made it to the front page, were those which I linked to from another relevant discussion. Those got 40-60 upvotes. But if I didn't link them from a relevant thread, they'd be stuck in the new page like all the other submissions.

For me it's a mixed bag, some of the stuff I write that I think will be for a very small set of people does surprisingly well, other stuff that I think is more important does much worse.

But just like making music, I write what I write because it helps me to put down my thoughts, how many others read it, find it useful and/or comment on it is really not that big a deal to me, though I'm always very happy when there is some kind of interaction around something I write. Usually I learn as much from the feedback and the comments as I did from doing whatever it was that I wrote about in the first place.

oh yeah, it's def something you need to do for yourself...but it's all about priorities.

If I knew the article would have a chance on HN, I'd probably put a little bit more priority on it.

That's true, I supposed I'd never considered what it would be like from a publisher's perspective. Does HN push enough traffic to make it worthwhile to create content directly targeted at its users? Knowing what to expect for traffic would help me evaluate if its worth it to invest 2-3 hours at a x% chance of hitting the homepage.

So far as the value of 'x%' goes, there are certainly ways you could game the current system in your favor: linkbait the title to appeal to a very specific demo, get a few friends lined up for a quick upvote... it doesn't seem like it would be too much trouble. I often see very recently submitted articles with 3-4 upvotes at or near the top of the homepage. If the only reason you're writing is for traffic, there certainly appears to be a lot of opportunity. Am I wrong?

it's not really about points or traffic. Mostly it's just knowing that the people who asked me to do the article actually get to see it.

If it never makes it to the front page, where 99% of the people view the stories, then all that effort was for naught. And I might as well save my time.

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