How to hit the Hacker News front page (and what it’s worth)
ryanwaggoner.com
ryanwaggoner.com
I understand why you'd want to "protect against this phenomenon", because I agree that it's probably negative in the long run, but I think something needs to be done about the new page, because a lot of good stories are being missed. People talked about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720742
All that said, I'd like to hear more about your feeling on this; I'd be disappointed if you felt I was intentionally spamming HN or gaming the system to the detriment of the community.
EDIT: Oh, and one more thing: my tweets always link to the original content on my blog, not to the post on HN (or even worse, never to the submit URL on HN).
Why then, when I looked at your site, did it pop up a little pseudo-window saying "Hello HN reader, if you like this I would really appreciate an upvote"?
http://img.skitch.com/20100929-xq3tsubtd9dkgj9uxbjdechmik.pn...
I installed WP Greet Box, which displays different messages to different people depending on their referrer, but I didn't think it was working for HN. Maybe it's because we're on different browsers (I'm on Safari 5)?
Also, this message would only appear if you were coming from the story on HN, not from a link on Twitter, so I'm not sure it's relevant here anyway.
EDIT: Yep, I see the message now in Firefox and Chrome. Should I disable? I'm not sure I see the problem with reminding people who came to the post from HN to vote for the story if they think it's worthwhile, but what do others think?
I thought it was a pretty obnoxious message, and that it should be disabled.
Honestly, I find the whole tone of this discussion pretty obnoxious. The thing that can destroy HN is when the front page stops being filled with the stories which people find most interesting and starts being filled with borderline-interesting stories from the best self-promoters.
Even submitting your own blog posts for consideration is something that I don't really consider to be kosher, and I'd never do it myself.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445455
Specifically this comment by PG:
Yes, it's ok to submit your own stuff. If you get to the point where you've submitted 20 things and none of them got any upvotes, though, you may want to start to be more selective.
It's all the more important there because the front page is reverse chronological and anyone who's been there a week can post to it.
And: Lowering the threshold of work needed to share something reduces the average value of the things shared. It's not a big deal when you can moderate who is sharing things with you, but it's catastrophic for a communal service like HN. It is the path to funny cat pictures.
Of course, this supposes that I'm not in the category of people creating funny cat picture content. And the realization that perhaps I am more than I'd like is somewhat uncomfortable. How do you know for sure?
Do they do so for me. If I think something is interesting or valuable, I'll tell people, and do it in my own way.
I don't see how these buttons help me or add value to the content of a site. I'd rather readers be encouraged to participate in a discussion.
I'm one of those who do not respond well to blatant prodding for mindless promotion. I've some bookmarklets for posting things on friendfeed and HN, and use them when a site is interesting.
Maybe those buttons work well with others. But will they create the kind of audience you want? Does that even matter when you're just trying to get some initial attention?
Essentially, that is what the article advocated (oh, and write interesting content - duh).
Let the user actually read the story, then come back to vote on it if they like.
It's probably also worth making a note when a user clicks through to a story so that later on you can verify that he's read it before counting his vote for it. (Naturally, you'd also need to note referrals from the story itself to make this work.)
(I suppose yesterday I mislinked this submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1737079 )
That's the only way any non-groupthink content gets to the front page, and most of the time it fails anyway because a dozen submission-upvotes were spread out over a day or two. If anything more weight should be applied to it to counteract aging.
This is a powerful outcome of writing frequently on the web. Have any other bloggers experienced this?
This is obvious and old hat for the more experienced corporate drones here, but it's important for all the newbies to understand that [all, but especially HR] processes and policies are made to be broken, and they are often so dysfunctional in large corporations that if someone at an appropriate level wants something done, it will be done.
(My personal experience suggests that managers and below have 0 power, and only directors+ start being able to work the informal network.)
If everyone has to develop a cabal to get to the front page, then over time the size of the cabals will have to grow because of the increased competition - eventually squeezing out the little guy, no matter how good his content is.
With an active userbase on the new page cabals would be less likely to form.
The facebook gripe post wasn’t completely linkbait-y, since it provided a nice basis for a solid discussion, but by itself it was pretty light on substance. I’d personally much prefer to see gripes with more meat on them; “show, don’t tell”.
And he doesn't even exist: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353050
(shocking news alert -- rms is an alias I use on the internet sometimes. Nevertheless, I also exist.)
He exists too, but his name isn't Max Klein, and 'parable' is the most charitable reading of most of what he posts under that persona.
Edit: in fairness, this blog post title was too sensational, so I've changed the HN post to be less so. Unintentional, but still, my apologies.
If you look at Digg or Reddit they are essentially just bit lists of overly sensational titles.
One thing I like about HN is that we manage to mostly avoid that... and titles are generally fairly informative.
I typically only downvote/flag stories that have overly sensational titles, b/c I view them as bait for the more cursory of readers, who don't generally make thoughtful comments b/c their attention span is calibrated toward sensational, dopamine trigger words.
I've found that if a post makes it to the HN front page it's generally quality reading, so a sensational title actually provides a signal not to read it.
I think something like "My Thoughts on Facebook's Apps platform API"
If you instead write something that lots of people upvote, then all those upvotes convey the following information: "Lots of people liked this."
Now, it's still bad that they "liked" it only because they know who wrote it and think he's generally interesting. The outcome for HN is probably still that what's on the front page doesn't match what's most interesting as well as everyone would like. But the problem is low-quality real information, not fake information. It's not bad in the same way at all.
For example, yesterday, I tweeted this:
http://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/25811540605
Which resulted in this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1736805
Which is cool, but it was on the home page for about 5 minutes total, because those votes came too slowly for it to hit the front page. That's all good and fine, but then today, I wake up and see this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1738560
Which is just blogspam, but shows that this story is important, because it ended up getting lots of comments.
I'm not sure how to make this better, just providing a recent example.
1. Encourage more people to monitor the "new" page, and
2. Slow down the submission of crap to the "new" page.
For instance, why is there no karma threshold for submitting new links? I just had a quick look, and there's several new links from someone trying to sell holidays to Vietnam with an account that was created eighteen minutes ago.
Even though I know what "new" does, I seem to interpret it as "create something new" instead of "view new submissions". Maybe I'm just an odd person but I think changing that to "newest" could make a difference if there are more people like me, especially for new users.
I'd do A/B testing by changing it to "Hot Fresh Exciting New Links!" and see how many people now click on it.
I wouldn't think the HN crowd are big ad clickers (if they see the ads in the first place).