Ask HN: Can you authentically make the front page anymore?

You ask if you can "authentically" make the front page like you used to "by having my friends upvote an article/side project I'd post", but isn't asking your friends to upvote your article inauthentic? Also, your article, while legit in content, has a clickbait title: "The Fastest Way to Increase Your Site's Performance Now".

Where do you draw the line on what is authentic / inauthentic? Why is timing when you submit your article worse than using a clickbait title?

That said, I understand what you're getting at; unfortunately as a community grows in size, it's by nature going to become harder for "regular" people to get attention. It's still possible though.

As other users have pointed out, asking your friends to upvote is called a voting ring and not allowed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. We have software to counteract that. It doesn't catch everything, but it catches a lot. We also penalize and/or ban accounts and sites that do it regularly, depending on how bad the offense was.

There's a great deal of randomness in what gets traction. For that reason, we allow a small number of reposts to mitigate the randomness. You'll notice that in the FAQ too.

That second article you mention made the front page briefly but was quickly flagged, presumably because it wasn't substantive enough.

I "authentically" made the front page yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18129378. I also got on the front page a few months ago with something else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17558752.

Neither of these articles were written by me. But had I written them and submitted them, they would have made the front page just as they did when someone else wrote them and I submitted them.

I think there's definitely an element of chance involved based on the day and time of your submission. There's also a zeitgeist of rotating topics based on current events and things people care about in tech. You should also consider that you find interesting and substantive is somewhat subjective - whatever the merits of your content, others may prefer other content on the same topic for a variety of reasons.

Good, interesting content absolutely reaches the front page organically. My cursory observation is that it's easier to hit the front page with an actual, working project (Show HN) or with written content about an interesting technical topic that is broadly thought provoking but not particularly well-known. In this case, web performance is probably a comparatively difficult topic to get on the front page of HN.

I did once. But the content was flagged within 20 minutes and my site crashed. The people flagged the content because they disagreed with it. Basically I posted a list of doctors ranked by the number of opioids they prescribed [some on the top list are in jail now - not because of my list]. So, in my humble opinion it needs to be super relevant and controversial if you are trying to manufacture it.

I had google ads up, served 200k (impressions?) and made about $2.00. Hacker news people do not click ads.

https://www.opendoctor.io/opioid/highest

Wow — top doc on the list specializes in “Pastoral Counseling”? Something is missing from this story.

Sorry for the mix up.

The top doctor is "MURPHY,MARK" from AL in Pain Management.

                        id: 568652
                 doctor_id: 1233874
                       NPI: 1326019712
     NPPESProviderLastName: MURPHY
    NPPESProviderFirstName: MARK
      NPPESProviderZIPCode: 356015578
        NPPESProviderState: AL
      SpecialtyDescription: Pain Management
           TotalClaimCount: 38020
       DistinctOpioidCount: 25
          OpioidClaimCount: 21519
       PercentOpioidClaims: 56.6

NationalProviderIdentifier: 1326019712

I believe (again need to double check matching) he was arrested:

https://whnt.com/2018/02/27/federal-agents-raid-tennessee-pa...

"MURPHY,MARK" from the “Pastoral Counseling” was brought to the stop spot instead, this was fixed.

I don't think I've seen anything expressing so much entitlement in such a compact form on HN before.

> Years ago I was able to make the front page by having my friends upvote an article/side project I'd post

So you're using sockpuppet shills to commit the social equivalent of voter fraud to peddle your blog content. Very admirable.

> I've seen these unnecessary articles about gaming the front page: have you friends use an IP proxy...has it really come to this?

You just said that you use sockpuppets!

> I tried...getting friends to upvote

Maybe you should stop doing that.

> I'm just kind of beside myself.

You'd feel better if you didn't establish your sense of self worth based on getting blog posts on the front page of Hacker News.

> I'm not just trying to peddle my own content

Yes you are. It is literally what you are doing, and you admit to trying to subvert the voting system by engaging shills to help you do it.

You wrote the teenage diary equivalent of "compressed images are smaller than uncompressed ones, news at 11", which is not interesting, substantive, or novel. I think you might be misjudging the HN audience if you expect it to hit the front page.

I've had blog posts "authentically" make the front page, and had blog posts disappear without a trace. Sometimes the same blog post gets both behaviors, being much more successful after someone reposts it. There's a whole lot of randomness in what gets upvoted. You can't take it personally.

As far as getting your friends to upvote the article, keep in mind that HN has some sort of voting ring detection, so this may be penalizing you.

I did a fairly detailed reverse engineering of the ranking formula a few years ago: http://www.righto.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work.h...

Heh, well I guess the answer is yes. Which amuses me, since as one of the aforementioned friends I did upvote your other articles, so seemingly no effect, but had no idea about this one and just found it on the front page!

I've had organic stuff on the front page maybe 2 years ago. What time frame are you asking about that you've noticed this change? I'd be very curious to see HN user growth numbers. I imagine it's just gotten a lot more competitive lately.

I've made the front page several times by sharing sciency articles that I found interesting. Sometimes articles I thought would flop ended up doing well. Other times articles I thought would do well ended up with 2 upvotes. Theres likely a myriad of factors to consider, like the time you submit (if alot of readers are on at that time), etc. I've never resorted to using friends or subverting the upvote system, which doesn't really jive with the whole "authentic" bit you mention... So yes you can definitely make front page, don't take it so personally. I personally think the HN audience is averse to bullshit and clickbait, so trying to "game the system" will actually backfire. Speak honest truths that are relevant because they should be shared, not for the pursuit of upvotes.

I make the front page by posting articles that are interesting to a technical audience, or people interested in the intersection of internet development and business. One weekend last year I had three very different articles hit the front page in one weekend.

Looking at the results now, it appears one out of thirty of my submissions make the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mcenedella

It definitely doesn’t “pay” to post articles to HN, so I suppose I just do it because I value the community and want to give back relative to the enormous value I’ve received over eight years...

Looks like you just made it without any faked or many upvotes.

Show HN is automatically ranked higher IIRC

I did make the front page once, but actually it only happened after a moderator "re-upped" it and sent me an email. This put it in the "second-chance pool" as he called it which will randomly put it on the front page at some point. I think once it got on the front for even a short time, enough people up voted it to sustain it for a while. I guess very few people look past the front page, and even fewer in the new section.

Congrats, this post made the front page, seems like you don’t need our advice!

As the tables turn, did you have your friends upvote this or something?

Funny story - I sent to go comment on this on my mobile phone. Decided my response was too long for mobile, then went to my computer.

In that time, this post disappeared from the front page and from the "Ask HN" section.

My guess, is people are flagging the content.

----

Also, I've emailed the moderators about my website:

https://hnprofile.com/

Which, consistently gets 4 - 6 up-votes very quickly. Yet never went to the front page, even though my reddit version of the website did:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18081921

There was no suppression they were aware of, but it did look like my "friends" were up voting. If your "friends" up vote; they don't count. It's quite possible, you were receiving no authentic up votes and as such your post did not rank. You can always email the moderators and ask, contact info is at the bottom.

How is it authentic to have your friends upvote your articles?

You can definitely authentically make the front page, but it's going to be hit or miss just because the audience fluctuates. There's numerous reasons why your article didn't hit the front page. For example, the kiboit.com article is far more minimal than your article. It's possible that readers at that time were in the mood for more minimalism.

If targeted content marketing was easy then it wouldn't be a professional field. It's going to be hard. Just because you manufactured an article for an audience and it didn't work, that doesn't mean you have to start blaming the audience.

EDIT: One other note, the audience you've been a part of for 8 years has changed a lot. The audience 8 years ago is very different from the audience today is very different from the audience 2 years from now

https://www.kitlang.org made the front page recently; I was asleep and didn't notice until I woke up with a bunch of notifications and emails. Content that appealed to people, not gaming, got it there.

My brother hit the top spot with the first article on his blog in April and he didn't do anything special. Your content has to resonate and maybe you have to get a little lucky. But it's definitely not all gamed content.

The front page can be hit or miss. New can have a lot junk, but I will say lately, have found more interesting stuff on like page 2, 3 and new. Although I tend to go quite a few pages in.

I have also had trouble getting any significant number of upvotes most of the time. To the point where I rarely even try to submit anymore. If I had to guess I would say that timing probably is very important for HN. Also luck. The more interesting a link is to me the less likely it seems that it will become popular. I am not comfortable with trying to game it but I have a feeling many people who have success here must be doing so.

Timing is absolutely important. Articles sit for such a limited time in the queue that you only have a small window to upvote.

I've seen the same article posted by the same user at different times of day, and the ones that landed at the the right time got upvoted and the others didn't.

I haven't collected the stats on what an optimal time is, but I'm guessing it's the start of the workday in the Eastern time zone (where the the majority of the population of Canada and United States is concentrated).

Yes, I have only had two articles out in the last couple of years, both reached the front page, one the top spot. Neither involved any shenanigans.

I think sites that use a voting mechanism to rank content will always favor "power users" who are able to coordinate an effort to get content voted on.

Part of the reason for this is that regular users don't have a lot of incentive to spend time under "new" curating content, and it is difficult to for the maintainers of a site to detect and counter coordinated voting efforts.

Writing software to detect and counter coordinated voting is one of the things I've spent the most time on since I started working on HN, and pg had a pretty good system before that. It doesn't catch everything, but it catches an awful lot. I don't believe the stories that make HN's front page are getting there primarily for that reason.

It might just be slow- or lack of initial momentum. When I did Show HN for a beta of my window manager, I got quite a lot of conversation, and about a 100 points. Last month (two years later) a post about a major release got 0 traction.

Lately I noticed a lot of non-hacking related stuff here, and now I wonder if actual tech articles sink off the front too fast because of that.

I submitted this 1.5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13913015 I did not tell anyone and it made the front page for a little while.

I think that, in general, stuff on the front page is pretty good. But as you say, they certainly are exceptions sometimes.

why do you think any specific content (yours included) “deserves” the front page. it’s not pay for placement.

this is misguided IMHO

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention: iirc HN has a mechanism that downranks articles that acquire a lot of comments relative to votes. Not sure if that has anything to do with your experience, but it explains why "controversial" posts (i.e. things like startup politics) tend to get buried.

I really dislike that mechanism. I want to read controversial posts because they might challenge me. I have to resort to using /active to get an uncensored view (at least that seems to be what /active does). Also, getting many comments on a submission doesn't necessarily mean the subject is controversial -- it could simply mean that many people have experiences to share on a certain subject.

Can we just let the up votes do what they're supposed to do and stop trying to distort the system with weird arbitrary rules?

No, because then the front page would consist mostly of the same few hot topics over and over, and high-octane sensational threads, most of which are low-quality and turn into flamewars.

HN cannot live by upvotes alone—the upvoting system is pretty broken and needs countervailing mechanisms. Those mechanisms consist of software, community, and moderation. The result is the type of website this is. It would be completely different otherwise.

Your article was simply not interesting enough.

> I don't want to have to game HackerNews to get relevant content to this audience

You seem to think getting your blog on the front page serves some higher purpose. You do not decide what's relevant, especially if it's your own articles.

I've authentically made the front page 3 times in the past two weeks. No help from my friends.

The few times I’ve submitted something, it’s been because I saw it, thought it was interesting, and thought maybe someone else would, too.

But nope, they didn’t. Their loss. Moving on.

Apparently not gaming the system doesn’t work, but at least I don’t feel like I was somehow cheating the system.

HN ranking system is unknown to me. However I recently started clicking on domains just to discover that many people are adding the same stuff several times. Maybe this is the way now?

A small number of reposts is ok if a story hasn't had attention yet. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. This is to mitigate the randomness of what gets traction, because otherwise too many good stories would fall through the cracks. Lots more explanation here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

This discussion reminds me that I need to up-vote articles that I like more often.

I hardly ever up-vote articles!

You want to make the front page you need to come at is with something unique not startling or starving for attention. Put a lot of time into something and "Show HN". If your stuff is good maybe you can climb back to the top but you won't outsmart a croudsourced algorithm of smart folks with gimmick.

This post was flagged. What a perfect irony.

I've been wondering the same lately. For example, [1] was quite suspicious to me, as I don't think that many people are into website analytics. Anyway, HN is one of the most popular news aggregators for the tech community, so naturally people try to game the system, I'd say the majority of posts are legitimate though. If you look at the stats of users that post things you can see that most of them have many submissions that go nowhere, along with a few that become quite popular.

If you're using HN to promote your projects I'd recommend you to try other platforms as well. Personally I had success with Reddit and found the community there quite good. Also, since it's more fragmented than HN it's easier to get to the frontpage of specialized subreddits, which for a product is the thing that counts most (IMHO).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024277

You don't get 900+ points without a lot of people being interested in the topic.

I took a look at the submission; of the first 5 votes, three were bogus and were dropped by the software (and we've penalized those accounts). But the other two were clearly from legit users, and that was enough to get liftoff from /newest.