Getting Hacker News’d Twice – Lessons Learned for Entrepreneurs | Hacker News Reader

Getting Hacker News’d Twice – Lessons Learned for Entrepreneurs

getpolarized.io

54 pointsburtonator35 comments

> This post is actually a meta experiment. > > My hope is that this is actually the 3rd time we’re going to make it on HN. :)

It certainly seems like you'll succeed :)

Does the Web app/Chrome extension support Anki? That's what I hoped I'd be able to use it for.

The Electron version does but I actually didn't realize that I could actually make sync work if I used a web extension / chrome extension and just requested access to http://localhost:anki_port ... so I might try that and update the web extension that way.

This would mean you don't need to use the full desktop app.

It's been interesting getting the zen of the desktop + chrome + mobile thing all working and humming along.

We're getting close to having MacOS + Windows + Linux + Web + Mobile...

HackerNews front page is good for thousands of views. As much as 10,000 if you can get near the top.

r/programming is good for a couple of tens of thousands of views. Reddit is hard and random. Getting the first ~20 votes is soooo random. Subreddits like r/rust are smaller, but passionate, and good for a few thousand views.

r/dataisbeautiful is good for hundreds of thousands of views. It's a very slow subreddit so if you can hit #1 you'll be on it's frontpage for 24 hours plus. I cracked half a million views from there once.

I've never gotten shit for traffic from Twitter or Facebook.

I actually made it once or twice to HNs front page, and what I've seen is that HN is one of the heaviest users of adblockers in the general population. I did a request counter vs an analytics counter, and I'd say you easily get 2x or 3x the traffic google analytics shows.

Oh.. that's interesting. I noticed that FF is blocking GA by default now - or at least my configuration.

I think I'm going to inject a tracking pixel to see if you're hypothesis is correct. Just to measure the number of requests.

It would actually be really interesting to see.

Polar has about 15% FF usage right now that hit the site directly.

Which honestly makes a ton of sense. while the HN crowd might be the biggest beneficiary of ad tech, they also are the most knowledgeable about blocking it and of course know how intrusive and annoying it is.

We call those types of people hypocrites where I come from.

It’s just “You don’t get high on your supply”.

When the comparison to a heroin dealer is considered more charitable...

I don't disagree.

My site has been front-paged on HN several times as well, and I can corroborate. On those occasions my log files show something like a tenfold uptick in average traffic, while GA registers a tripling or so. When I get front-paged on reddit, by contrast, GA shows about 70-80% as many visitors as indicated in the access log.

Also, my site is supported by donations, and when one of our articles gains traction on HN we get a substantial increase in one-time donors during that day. Other big sites like reddit barely bump the numbers at all, despite often bringing a much greater increase in total visitors.

One time we were front-paged on /r/TodayILearned, and GA showed a peak of 6,680 concurrent visitors. Hotchie motchie.

How do you implement the request counter? I tried to find a better way to get metrics on my blog than Google Analytics but couldn't find a good, easy solution.

And how do you know those views weren't bots/crawlers? Pulling apart "real" traffic from fake seems impossible. :(

You stopped me at " Just login and enter their credentials and they’re in" Providing credentials is at a cost. As you aptly point out in the rest of the post you will use those credentials in the future, and that's to the cost of us, the potential clients.

> you will use those credentials in the future, and that's to the cost of us, the potential clients.

How is that? I don't follow.

It's a cost to receive and manage any future email, and there is a risk that could get out of hand if a site passes on the email address to others.

Polar – an offline web browser with annotations and tagging

(in case anybody else is wondering)

It's interesting. From my Show HNs only one got a real spike.

The most recent two went by as if nobody ever saw them. That includes the one I consider the most important (basically, TensorFlow for C#). I feel if it does not start with "Google announces", nobody cares to look.

Maybe I need more clickbait in the titles :/

This guy is spamming his product on here day in and day out.

We are "insanely smart" guys.

And gals.

But seriously, that is why I come to HN...so I can talk to people smarter than me, or at least, expert in an area I am not.

Careful, HN is also full of blowhards. "Blockchain" and "NoSQL" are dead giveaways.

> We are "insanely smart" guys.

We listen to NPR because we are better than you - Luis CK

We read hacker news for same reason :)

Is this high HN traffic? Sites can't routinely be going down with 2k users and 20k page views right?

Not modern ones on decent architecture. Going down isn't the problem so much as making sure the content + app you're trying to showcase is working.

If you do a Show HN post and your app doesn't scale or has a glitch it would suck to have everyone have a poor experience.

Years ago, when one of my posts made it to #1 on Hacker News, the traffic was so much for my cheap WordPress blog hosted on DreamHost that they "moved" the blog to a more high-demand system and somehow corrupted the database in the process.

In less than 24 hours I learned how static blog sites work and somehow I was able to migrate everything using Google caches.

Maybe half a decade ago it wasn't uncommon, these days it's pretty rare to see something crash out from HN post DDoS unless it's some kind of webapp that isn't properly scalable

NICE BUT ALL MY PDFS HAVE A HEAVY TEAL TINT ON THEM AND I CANT TURN IT OFF AHHHHHHHH IT SEEMS TO BE A FEATURE I CANT TURN OFF BECAUSE IT CORRELATES WITH THE READ-PROGRESS BAR

In Polar and they have a teal tint? Can you create a bug and I'll take a look.. maybe attach a screenshot? I haven't seen this one before.

https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/issues

Yeah--I thought/think it's a feature, so you know how far you've read, but when I saw it I thought, "_Wow_ that's a strong design statement that I doubt I'll ever get used to."

oh. Sorry. Yes. The pagemarks are overlays showing which portions of documents you've read.

Just a heads up on iOS with Safari your two GA images are wider than the rest of the page.

Thanks! Fixed it!

Hey. This is interesting. The title of the post I submitted changed.

Who changed it? Does HN automatically change the titles of posts?

I believe it’s done by the mods.

You are to submit URLs with their original titles.

What title did you use in your submission?

Think this is great information for people like me. I am a serial entrepreneur.

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