Getting Featured on Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Getting Featured on Hacker News

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162 pointsdougk1684 comments

Semi-related, but is there some friendly algorithm behind the scenes at HN that resubmits articles if they go flying off /newest without a lot of attention? I submitted a blog post last week that made it to the front page, but its path there was kind of odd. I had submitted it the night before and watched it scroll listlessly off the first page of /newest. The next morning, it was on the front page with a posted time of "5 hours ago", probably a good 8 hours after I originally posted it.

There is! Humans find them and software reposts them. It's called the second-chance pool and is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and various links back from there. There are so many good submissions that get overlooked by the randomness of the initial traction wave—especially the quieter, offbeat kind, which often are the best kind of submission for HN, uncorrelated with anything else. I sometimes email people to let them know their post will be re-upped, but it looks like I didn't do that in your case.

By the way, if anyone sees that kind of post languishing without attention, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. It's clear that many if not most are still getting missed, and curiosity is what we're optimizing for, so we love getting those emails. One day we're going to write software to make this system more formal and open it to everyone.

Does it also repost comments with a new date?

A few days ago I saw a post dated an hour ago, with comments from "7 minutes ago" - when I swear I saw the same post with the exact same comments hours before.

Yes, the timestamps get updated when this happens.

Right. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380, which describes the re-up system, plus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774614 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16117291, which explain the timing bit.

rachelbythebay said it best: zombie post resurrection trickery with timestamps.

Really neat! So it seems that the best way to get featured on HN is still just... find or write interesting stuff. Good to know, thanks!

I wouldn't say we're there, but that's certainly the goal.

It happened to me too, submitted the link, tail -f httplog | grep blogpost, the usual bots, one to three up-votes, then it fell off the "newest". Left the terminal open and went on with work. When I was about to close down all open terminals and go home for the day, I noticed there was traffic! So I quickly checked HN and there it was, my post on the front page! I was so euphoric I couldn't prepare the dinner, walking around in circles, putting the plates in the refrigerator instead of the table, etc. Biggest surprise was there was mostly Macbooks, and also quite a lot of RSS readers in the User-agent.

Hacker News uses the "Soylent Green" AI algorithm for moderating the community: It's made of people!

I once submitted a blog post [1] and later received an email from someone at HN saying that it was a great article but didn't do so well and if I re-submit it, they will make sure it does better, so I did and it went to the top.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16862077

Would be interesting to see the correspondence, but don't feel obligated.

They do it frequently. I've had it happen several times. The specific text isn't particularly exciting. They just give you a link to resubmit if you're interested. You also get an extra upvote upon submission (and I imagine there is more of a bump behind the scenes).

What does HN feel about this? Is it curation from the staff or is it selective manipulation? On first blush, I'm for it... but I'd be interested to see what others think.

>Is it curation from the staff or is it selective manipulation?

Curation is selective manipulation. Whether it's positive or negative correlates to whether you personally agree with it.

Yes. I generally find HN works ie surfaces interesting stuff. I judge HN by what not how. The how moan is often “they don’t like my stuff” sniff sniff

at first thought I'd be against it. Because they essentially bump what they think is good, and it does not (necessarily) reflect the community. Sometimes things slip through at HN though so giving a nudge to resubmit sounds like a good idea.

Tbh, I don't really mind either way, I've enjoyed most content on here.

I guess a good community needs constant upkeep, like anything else in life. The community was created over what a few people thought was good content, and if left alone will probably get dissolved in some "large reddit" effect.

We bump what we think the community might like and is aligned with the site guidelines. And only to the lower half of the front page, whence it soon falls away if we guessed wrong. The posts aren't necessarily what we ourselves like or think is good; mostly we don't have time to decide on that.

You have time to decide if the community might like it but not if yourselves do? Bit weird.

If you do something hundreds of times a day for years, you get fast at it. Also, don't forget I said "might". These are quick, approximate guesses.

Fair enough. As I mentioned I am pretty happy with the content on here. Also happy with the moderations so thank you for that! :)

You have time to decide what to bump, but not to decide what you like? Makes no sense.

I’ve upvoted opinion pieces that I disagree with, but I wanted to see what the community thought.

They explicitly said they bump what they think the community might like. It doesn’t take a thorough reading of every submission to make that guess.

It does, unless you want to create an echo chamber (which HN somewhat is)

What would make HN less of an echo chamber?

I don't think it can be solved by moderation, if that makes you feel better

Do you have any answer to the question?

It makes me feel worse. But I'd like to hear why you say that HN somewhat is an echo chamber, and what you think would make it less of one, or where you might look for examples of non-echo-chambers on the internet. You're welcome to reply here, or email hn@ycombinator.com.

It's possible that you've observed something that's not on our radar, and such information is important for us to be aware of, even if we can't solve it by moderation.

Im aware. I’m skeptical of what Dang said that it should take more time to decide what they like.

I like it. Hn is still worth checking a few times every day. Whatever the staff is doing, it feels like they keep the quality relatively stable.

Interesting thing to know would be - whether HN staff does not allow the stories that they disagree with, to get popular.

I've had that happen a couple of times. The email is fairly bland - it looked like the sort of copy you'd write for an automated system. It includes a link to this comment by way of explanation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

the way it works is described in this HN post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 I've had about a dozen of them, I think probably because I'm in a time zone that gets buried more than others?

on edit: maybe it's not exactly the same thing because I don't have to resubmit when I get these, they are just put in the second chance pool.

that has happened to me too

The same happened to me just a couple of days ago. I thought it was a very nice thing for the quality of the content that goes to the top (not just because it was my submission, of course).

HN vote count seems pretty arbitrary. A few months ago I submitted one of my articles and it got 2 points. Someone else submitted it the same or next day and it got 111 points.

10 months ago someone submitted one of my articles and it got 3 points. It got submitted again earlier this month and that one has 401 points.

Same here. A few of my posts get 1 or 2 votes the first time they get posted to Hacker News. And then someone resubmits it a few months later and suddenly it gets 300 votes.

Occasionally someone like dang, or some other community moderator, suggests I try again.

Like most things in life, showing up, and luck, is 50-90% of it. You may have submitted during peak traffic and simply got lost in the flood. Or you submitted at a time when the people most interested in your post happened to be awake or on lunch break.

At least in grandparent’s testimony, it sounds like the article still ended up on the front page after the second try. That’s pretty great! If articles of quality always made it to the front page on the second submission at most, we’d be living in a very good world.

I once got to the top for a non-tech related post when I shared my story about skateboarding 86km from Sydney to Wollongong. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5530044

Still amazed it was well received here and grateful for all the friendly and encouraging comments

The linked to story is dead. Fortunately archive.org has it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130228011236/http://www.rotub....

I remember reading this back in the day. Reading it all over again today. Still madness!

A bit of the weird old Web, found via the linked article!

https://dougkoellmer.com/

The old web??? That's Web 4.0 baby!

In seriousness thanks for poking around and linking that. I'm interested in taking the engine running my site to the next level, think Wordpress or some other site builder with an easy admin console so people can create similar sites with arbitrary content. Let me know if anyone reading this would be interested.

Here's proof that it's at least a generalized engine: http://eagrereader.appspot.com/

Reminds me of Eagle Mode, an interesting user interface experiment.

I wasn't aware of this project. Just googled it: http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/index.html

Thanks, I'll be looking into this more.

For those curious, I wrote a similar little post: https://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/project/what-brief-ha...

Don't think I mentioned it in there, but this was also through a 'consider re-submitting' email (though I've had a couple more on front page without that process since). That post was a ton of work (like 6 weeks straight) so it was nice to get the bump and get it more visibility.

To this day that post gets a lot of views via organic search results, though the huge traffic spike died down pretty quickly. I try to submit stuff a couple of times these days (as you can see in my profile) to give the lottery a shot more than once, but am also fine with it being pretty luck (and curation) based.

I once got an article to the top of the front page and it was because it was about what I learned in 10yrs of blogging.

I expected a couple of other submissions of things I made like https://polispulse.org to do great, but they didn’t!

Success on HN cannot be engineered or tricked and content that is genuinely good always surfaces. I’m pretty sure it’s not economically viable to find a hack to rank an average submission. It’s by far easier and more rewarding to produce something worth sharing :)

I wrote up a post about getting on HN and how it's helped me build my Open Source project due to the feedback.

https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lesso...

I have actual stats rather than speculation in the article if you read my post.

It's more like 15k users over 24 hours... then usually another 5k. I included full google analytics charts if you're interested.

Thanks, your post is much more informative. :) I was writing mine from more of a story-telling perspective, but I'll be following up with a harder post-mortem.

FWIW I estimated visitor count mostly based on a requests per second metric I had handy from GAE console. Also sanity checked against other similar blog posts like ours to see other people's numbers. I'd say 50K was a good lower bound. It was hard to say but I'd be surprised if it was as low as 15K-20K. In my experience Google Analytics numbers can be really deceiving. Especially when you compare them to other tracking methods, and go "huh?". Or your other tracking methods are messed up. Either way! Lies, damn lies, and statistics, as they say. HN audience probably uses ad blockers a lot more too which could potentially really skew things, unless you're doing GA stuff server-side.

I made a conscious choice to not even track visitor count, which I'll expand on...in another blog post!

Good luck with Polar!

I have been at the top of HN several times, and I think we got 10-20K max. So 15K sounds reasonable, I'd say 50K looks off unless you stayed at the #1 spot for more than a day.

Also, the traffic is not very targeted. A lot of people reading news, but not necessarily early users of whatever you are doing. So traffic dies down pretty quickly.

PS: it's funny to see the bots posting anything that got popular on HN to reddit, and see the smaller peaks of traffic from Reddit the following days.

BTW, I think I'm going to put the subscribe by email input field right at the bottom of each blog post like you did, instead of linking to the subscribe page. Thanks for the tip!

There is one issue with the stats though. A lot of HN users are privacy focused, including me. Many have disabled GA or any other third party tool.

I think it will be more than 15k users for you in that regards.

To get the correct estimation, one might need to include an integrated pageview component on the app/post or maybe Snowplow.

As an extra data point, I've gotten ~300 votes twice and each time caused about 10-15k visits from HN over 24hrs and about 150 email subscribers.

The secondary downstream effects might have doubled that, e.g. due to tweets, reddit postings, discussion elsewhere etc.

150!? I was so happy about my first 6 subscribers. :)

How do you track visits? As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, if you're using GA I would expect it to be skewed by ad blockers from the HN crowd.

Just GA. Now that you mention it though, given all the pop-up blocking, my numbers are likely underestimated. I'll cross-reference with server logs next time.

re 6 vs. 150 subscribers. The trick to getting people to sign up is... (you are not going to like this)... a pop-up.

People on forums will complain about it.

People will sign up with fake and insulting email addresses to spite you. You may even get upset.

But my god will you gather emails from the people out there who actually care about the work you are doing.

> The trick to getting people to sign up is... (you are not going to like this)... a pop-up.

LOL. No sir, I don't like it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDGlN6mluGA

But I am going to put the subscription form at least at the bottom of each post, and think of other ways to get it in front of people. I may consider a popup in the future if I put the work in to make sure people who are already subscribed generally don't see it. Like when they confirm their subscription, set a cookie that will block the popup. Something like that. Or a "don't show me this again" button. I didn't see a popup on your site FWIW.

EDIT: Or duh, just a URL param like show_popup=false in the notification email URL.

Anyway thanks for the feedback. I'm realizing now that I've read your posts in the past and really enjoyed them, so you have another subscriber!

With my popup, I try to wait to show it until a moment when I feel the visitor is actually interested. At first approximation, that's when they have been on the page more than 60 seconds and scrolled down more than 70%.

Like you mentioned, I also use cookies to ensure people who have already subscribed (or hit X on a previous pop-up) don't see it again.

And thanks for subscribing! I love these random encounters on HN.

I had two blog posts hitting the top 4 in the last month. I write a fairly in depth post every week and submit. There was no real pattern I could recognize. Some went crazy, some got 0 upvotes. The quality of all post was very similar.

"I was feeling down in the dumps and wanted to revel in my misery a bit more by submitting Thoughter to Hacker News" I see, I'm not the only one who does this. lol.

Never thought Hacker News could generate that much traffic!

come on friends, we can get him back up to #1!

It's very important to note that getting to the top of Hacker News is an exception, not a rule for good projects (and definitely should not be a primary marketing strategy, as it's just a bonus).

I haven't seen an impact-of-getting-to-the-top-of-HN post in a very long time. Anecdotally, the traffic for a post getting to the top of HN is not what it used to be.

I don't know about traffic, but we tend to downweight meta posts, including ones about getting to the top of HN, because as a genre they're too samey and HN thrives on diffs because diffs are what's interesting to the community. This post is an exception, partly because the project resonated with the community in an unusual way, and partly because of the heart with which the story is written.

You're right that it isn't a marketing strategy. It's too much of a lottery. Worse, when projects or startups try to get attention that way, they make themselves less interesting.

> HN thrives on diffs

It's a device for distilling novelty in the world into /bestcomments.

> You're completely right that it isn't a marketing strategy, though.

Have you thought about creating a formal program to preflight more in-depth content? It's hard to justify spending 100 hours writing a blog post when the chances of having more than zero people see it depend on whether or not Elon Musk smoked weed that day or whatever. I realize it's partly just impossible to predict what people will be interested in, but that could be a way to encourage people to create more interesting stuff.

Yes, I've thought about that a lot. I agree with you that the economics are off—not in terms of money, but time and energy and attention. If that could change, then the pool of interesting projects and articles might grow, which would be great for us all.

How would you go about it?

I think it's fine just to have people submit proposals, getting the proposal approved, and then creating the content and having the final post approved, rejected, or getting suggested edits. This could either be done by the mods or by some sort of rotating panel. Then the final content could be treated like the jobs postings, where there is a separate tab for preflighted content and it lives on the front page for at least some minimum amount of time, longer if there is engagement.

It could also be interesting to try something like Edge.org, where different people create content around a given question or theme.

Isn’t this where persistence pays off? Don’t spend 100 hours writing a blog post: spend 100 hours writing 100 blog posts. Then keep going. People will notice, word will spread, and you’ll find yourself here (or wherever) organically.

If your stuff is any good, of course.

That's exactly the problem though; the incentives push people to write a hundred 1-hour blog posts rather than one 100-hour blog post. But everyone would be better off if people just wrote one or two really good posts a year.

I agree with your last sentence, but the natural way to get to write great posts is to hone your skills writing dozens of ok posts first.

The raw numbers are less important than the quality of those numbers. The HN audience is unlike any other when it comes to visitors who are more likely to accomplish your "business goal".

By that I mean, this community will signup, tinker, praise, buy and complain, at a much greater rate than any other form of web traffic.

I believe many readers skip the OP and dive straight into comments which are usually/occasionally more thoughtful.

Or to be warned about misleading content before reading.

I always skim the comments, then click through to the article if it sounds interesting.

Ouch that scrolling though

Oh could you expand? Something wrong on mobile or something? On some Android devices things were wonky but I thought I fixed everything.

I was reacting to the lack of scrolling inertia on Mobile Safari. Running 12.2.

Thank you I will check that out. Something about the side menu bar throws things off on mobile sometimes.

It's because the document/body itself isn't scrollable. Only the ".content_scroller" div within the body is scrollable, which causes all sorts of problems.

Rather than having two fixed height scrollable divs beside each other, you should remove the fixed height on .content_scroller and fix the sidebar to the side with `display: fix`.

Thanks for the tips. I opted for that .content_scroller because when the whole body was scrollable the side menu was really jumpy and glitchy on the Android phones I tested on. It also was doing weird things with the address bar, hiding and showing it in a seemingly random way.

I think you mean `position: fixed` rather than `display: fix` right? In which case the side bar class .side_bar_column already has that. Unless you mean a different class/element?

Anyway looks like I'll have to attack this scroll issue a little more systematically. People usually complain about scrolljacking. I'm doing the absolute opposite, trying to let browsers do their thing themselves, but apparently that's bad too lol. Can't win.

Yeah, I meant `position: fixed` (brainfart—I knew it didn't sound quite right). But it shouldn't have any issues at all on Android. It's how most websites do sticky headers, and I've never seen any glitching.

In any case, there are a lot of reasons for scrolling the main document rather than having a subscroller, including:

1. Auto-hiding the address bar when scrolling down on mobile (it's not weird—all browsers do it) and pull-to-refresh in browsers that have it

2. Better accessibility because it doesn't break the PageUp/PageDown keys

3. Momentum scrolling

4. Better scrolling performance (higher framerate) because browsers optimise main document scrolling over subscrolling

5. Support for #fragment linking

6. etc.[0]

[0] https://nolanlawson.com/2018/11/18/scrolling-the-main-docume...

The auto-hiding address bar on my 2 Android phones was straight-up glitchy with document scrolling, not the "convenience" behavior. Even other sites on my phone were fine. It was just my site, and I believe I tracked it down the the fixed side bar. When I get rid of that the scrolling was fine.

All your points have really convinced me to give document scrolling another go though. Thanks for the list and the link.

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