Behind the scenes of a failed Hacker News launch

Looking at the previous submission, I found the text more compelling than the video: unsurprising me because editing is really hard and very time consuming relative to editing text or even audio. Video is linear and text with headings is more of tree and hence can surface an explicit hierarchy for conceptual importance, summaries, etc to the user/reader.

My take on launching via Hacker News is that for a vlog or even a blog, there's high impedance. Recognition is fickle; one popular submission poorly correlates to the popularity of the next and subsequent submissions; and even the most popular items fade quickly.

My intuition is that serial content, like many things, tends to obtain overnight success "after ten years of hard work" and that blogs and vlogs become successful one reader/viewer at a time.

It might be worth looking at Jeff Meyerson's softwareengineeringdaily as a peer study in the space. It's a fairly recent enterprise based on regular content that might be of interest to the Hacker News community. That said, he's focused promotion efforts mostly elsewhere. My impression is that over the years, Hacker News has fewer and fewer sources where every piece of new content stands a high chance of popularity.

Anyway, good luck.

I like this… turning a (let’s just call it) “fail” into the “breeding ground of something new”.