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Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

>The best way to capture traffic from Reddit or Hackernews is to catch the eye of a star poster on these sites and have them post the link. Otherwise nobody will care. (Any star posters here? Feel free to post my stuff)

Eh? I have been reading HN for years and never once have I looked at the username of the person who posted a link, unless someone in the comments makes a reference to them. Do other people do that? What is the mechanism by which someone's star quality affects the number of people who click the links they post?

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It only takes about 5 points for a post to make it onto the front page early on. You may not care, and I may not care, but if 4 people out there do care, that's enough to get that post promoted.

You don't notice the poster and neither do I. But some posters carry enough cred (or have enough friends) that anything they post immediately get a bump out of the incoming links slush pile.

That's not counting the people who use multiple accounts and bots to push up their content (probably not a problem on hacker news but rife on reddit).

> But some posters carry enough cred (or have enough friends)

Is that really true? Look at tptacek's submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tptacek

That's a very solid list of submissions. Every fourth-or-so submission has hundreds or thousands of points. If you feel that's not great... Dunno. You're using a different yardstick than I am. That looks a lot like people consider his name to add credibility.

I absolutely know of at least one group of friends/colleagues who are all active on HN and whenever they see each other's posts will upvote them. I've stayed away from them (other reasons) since before I found out, but when I heard it explained why I'd seen them frontpaged a few times.

Interesting that they are not triggering the voter ring detection.

5 up votes is not enough vigor to trigger the rigger trigger

Maybe it needs some more rigor?

It will probably trigger dang into looking into it now.

This got me thinking if there was an addon for that, and not surprisingly there is:

https://kishanbagaria.com/userscripts/show-hn-karma/

Works fine on Chrome, now I can see everyone's karma while browsing the submissions and commenting.

You can use hnapp.com (or various other tools) to build an RSS feed of someone's submissions - e.g. http://hnapp.com/rss?q=author%3ADiabloD3%20%20type%3Astory.

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