Show HN: Daily non-commercial blog posts which didn't reach HN's front page | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Daily non-commercial blog posts which didn't reach HN's front page

hnblogs.substack.com

289 pointspolote93 comments

Hello, I've used to rely on HN to discover new blogs, but recently I feel like a lot of content is just news article and very often several time the same news which reach the front page (even though still a lot of blog posts become popular). This has already been discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093990 in case you are interested. This is disappointing for me because there are still a lot of people who submit quality blog posts every day on HN and those content are just mixed long all the other posts and most of them never reach the front page.

So every day I go through all the links posted the current day on HN and keep only the non commercial blog posts, (and I removed the ones that reached the front page) there are not that many of them, about a dozen every day, and I build an article listing all those links.

(Note that some blog posts can end up being popular on HN after I created the daily article)

Feel free to subscribe, this is on substack but this is completely free. Somehow a substack blog is very quick to create, even if I hate their product.

You might like http://news.ycombinator.com/classic which uses an older ranking algorithm that (IMO) delivers more interesting news

I had no clue that was a thing and been here for years, that algo is far better.

I also wish, all those "special URLs" were documented somewhere. There are quite a few of those.

Didn't know about "classic" either!

I listed some non-discoverable URLs here: https://gist.github.com/jakub-g/803ad2c074ad1fbe2af5

Happy to discover more - please put comments here or on the gist.

Lots of info collected by minimaxir here: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

I love the idea of exposing different algorithms so that upvotes are distributed a little more evenly.

Why do you hate their product?

I am curious because I happen to love their product, even though I only use it as a free blog/newsletter hosting too.

But the paid newsletter incentives make a lot of sense to me (as it will never substitute free content, if that’s what you are worried about).

No affiliation, although I would like to have. I applied two times to work there but got rejected

I don't want to do a negative review , I think the value they provide is great, but the actual product is not very good. Like no api, low customization of text in the editor, ux of header difficult to understand, I did not like using the product

Neat! I subscribed via RSS. Can you expound on what exactly the criteria are? I'm assuming it's subjective, which is fine, but since almost all submissions are on the front page for at least a few seconds, I'm curious how this part works. Also worth pointing out (maybe there's another product for this): I would also be interested in things that maybe made the front page but I still missed, perhaps because they were only on the front page for a few hours.

I try to be the less subjective as possible, I only list recent posts, not associated with a company, not on a popular topic, somewhat related to tech, works without cookies, less than 5 up votesand it looks like a blog. If you verify all those, this is pretty likely to be included

Would you consider posting the individual blog posts in your rss feed? Use the original text, link through the original url, and maybe add a header or footer with HN link.

This way you don't have to leave your rss reader if you just want to read the article/post, which is kind of the point of the rss reader.

For those who also want to subscribe by RSS, here's the URL:

https://hnblogs.substack.com/feed

But if your feedreader does not pick that up when adding https://hnblogs.substack.com/ directly, you might want to switch to a better reader ;)

I use Slack to get notifications on new articles (I then read them on the original website), and it does not resolve to /feed.

Is there a standard for feed paths (/rss.xml seems common) that readers crawl when given a URL ?

It’s not a standard path, it’s this element:

You can even have multiple (I think wordpress standard is "articles" and "comments" feeds) of them for different feeds.

"because there are still a lot of people who submit quality blog posts every day on HN"

I'd like a follow feature.

Shameless plug: I built Typehut[1] for use cases like this, spinning up a super quick blog/publication that people can subscribe to.

Custom templates and domains are built-in too.

[1] https://typehut.com

Great! Subscribed!

Exactly!

As someone who rarely submits anything, it can be pretty disappointing on those rare occasions when I do try post something I found interesting and see it failing to invoke any interest whatsoever. Than again, I just published two days ago what I found to be an extremely interesting and well written non-commercial blog post and not only did it fail to grasp anyone's attention, it didn't even got into your list.

Oh well, at least it isn't my own post.

It's an unfortunate reality of this site that the top position is always terrible (my eyes have been trained to not even look that high on the page if I see the orange color scheme), and the best posts are languishing somewhere with 2 upvotes.

I guess the optimization is for reasonable quality at the middle of the front page.

e: of course, now that I say that, the actually excellent iMessage for Windows article from this thread has been placed on top.

HN is too random. I've submitted my own blogs and gotten zero comments and only a couple of upvotes. Two days later someone submits the same link to my content and it'll get 100 comments and thousands of clicks.

In my experience HN is far more random than both Twitter and Reddit. It's very frustrating and disappointing.

HN suffers the same problem as reddit, but amplified. The first five votes are far more meaningful than the next 50. Since HN has a shorter time factor than reddit, the effect is amplified.

If you get five votes in the first minute you'll almost certainly be on the front page. If you get one downvote in the first minute you'll almost certainly never make the front page.

I've been thinking a long time on a solution for this. My gut feeling is that every post should start with 10 points. That way one downvote won't kill it, and one upvote will only be 1/11 of the total score, instead of 100% of it.

Usually at reddit the way we would tweak these things is Chris would graph out each candidate algorithm in matlab and then we would go with the one that most continuous and "looked right", but you sort of need a PhD in Physics to get that right. :)

My experience as well. I've submitted numerous times and been shocked that it gets maybe one vote, and sometimes days later I see the same link but it's hundred of votes and sitting on the front page.

My current theory that is entirely without basis or data to back it up is certain users are given a lot more weight. A post of mine with 6 to 10 upvotes won't make it to page 2, but I'll see some with 4 upvotes on the front page. Oh well.

> certain users are given a lot more weight

Almost certainly not. My submissions regularly reach the front page, but it's still a very small fraction, and, as you observed, often only at the fourth or fifth try.

HN's "submission success" is indeed highly random. Your submission gets between few minutes and two hours at /newest (and if it's got longer that's because it's a time of low activity: nighttime in America).

Either the "right" readers for your submission happen to be active at this timespan, or they don't.

I'm almost certain that is not the case. It's mostly based on time. The faster you get votes the faster it climbs.

The mods do have the ability to "slow down" a post, if they think it will cause a flame war or is actively causing one. It basically makes it fall quickly by increasing the number of votes needed to reach the same position.

But having some votes worth more than others would be in opposition to the egalitarian principles of the site.

Oh, and when YC partners and founders log into HN, they get highlights for other YC people, so it may look like YC people are getting a boost, but really they're just getting more visibility to a subset of users, who tend to upvote other YC users quickly.

Another important part is voting rings -- companies who want to get high up will send out an email saying "We are submutting at time X, be ready to upvote".

Is it possible that time of posting matters? When there are increased number of high trending posts on first page, it is very less likely that a new post gets any attention irrespective of quality of content.

If you watch it closely, all the posts are stalled when the US folks sleep. The only active changes on the top page are during the kind of short 10-12 hourish time period when dang is awake and cares about the submissions.

It definitely matters. I’ve hit #2 or #3 here or on Reddit when any other day that’d week I’d hi t#1. Sometimes you just get unlucky and a big story comes out. Clicks are logarithmic, but there’s no way around that.

I’ve tried experimenting at all times of day. I like around 8am pacific. That’s almost lunchtime on the east coast, but Europe is still up to. It takes time to rise. If you take off then you’ll be placed high from east coast dinner time and hopefully through west coast evening.

Getting more than 10 clicks on HN is a complete and total dice roll. As best I can tell there is no rhyme or reason. Not for my content at least. r/programming r/cpp and r/rust have been highly reliable for me. Consistent top 5 placement.

For context here’s my archive. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/

Assuming you are referring to the article below, I agree, it's quite interesting and informative.

https://violentmetaphors.com/2013/09/08/an-example-of-how-to...

Hacker News is fickle, but you can kind of guess what it wants. Based on my own experience, a post about making the Objective-C runtime faster that leads with a meh title and x86 assembly is not really too likely to do very well: it’s hard for people to relate to. But a satire post on something people can understand? That can get a thousand upvotes in a few hours. (Probably even more, if it didn’t disappear from the front page suddenly in what I’d guess is downranking based on the lack of interesting content…) Post something people know about and discussion will tend to the most general thing in the article, and you’ll get upvotes from the people who can find those keywords. If you don’t provide that, then it’s much harder to do well even though the quality of your post might be higher.

I've had only one blog post go viral on HN (and it was not even I who posted it here) and it was one that was not technically interesting (in my opinion at least), but polemic and intentionally provocative.

I wrote it in a fit of anger, not to attract attention... everything I'd written before, where I put lots of effort to make interesting points or create useful projects went mostly unnoticed compared to that angry post.

Unfortunately, that's the kind of content that "engages" people, it seems (HN is no different than any other "social media" platform, why would it be?).

I've had a few submissions reach the front page, but I can never predict which ones will do so...definitely not the ones I thought were extra cool.

What's the most extra cool one that never made it?

I’m not the poster you asked, but I was extremely surprised when my article on what it took to write a native iMessage client for Windows 10 and the roadblocks and traps Apple left to stop it from happening didn’t get more than a handful of votes; it really seemed to me to be exactly the mix of things that HN readers normally ask for more of.

https://neosmart.net/blog/2018/imessage-for-windows/

The dominant factor in what gets traction off /newest is randomness, unfortunately, so you can't conclude anything from one or two data points. I'll send you a repost invite for that one.

^ As of 11:24 PM EDT this story is now the top story on HN. Kind of nuts!

That's actually very cool -- I've always lamented that iMessage never had a Windows client. I can relate to also posting a few projects/posts that I thought were cool which never hit the front page, but I've also had 4 or so of my blog posts hit top-10 over the past few years, so I shouldn't complain.

I was surprised that my post on a strategy to make modern web apps work without JavaScript didn't get any attention, but I might just need some work on my writing and titles.

The topic is one I expected to hit the nail on the head with the HN crowd, though.

https://blog.klungo.no/2020/05/28/using-react-and-redux-to-a...

never got any interest in any non-commercial blog posts I found interesting but never generated any fumes.

Well you've got our attention now. What's the article?

https://violentmetaphors.com/2013/09/08/an-example-of-how-to...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23383599

It is a demonstration of the author's guide of how to read scientific papers methodically.

You just have to keep submitting. Of all the things I've submitted I'd say <10% have hit the front page, but those that have, got a lot of comments and interest. I like to think that even if only one person saw what I posted, then the submission was worth it.

Pin the submission bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar, as it makes submitting a breeze with almost zero effort.

Also, for others, if you see a high ranked submission that you like from a user, click on their name and see what else they've submitted - it's a good way to find hidden gems.

Also, when you're on someone's profile, take a look at his favorites: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=Jaruzel

In your case there are no favorite submissions, but some people have them.

I use my favourites list as a 'no time now, read later' list. :)

I'm sorry that your post didn't reach the front page and it is not included, in my most because I only pick recent blogposts. This is maybe not the best choice, but I want to encourage individual to post frequently and also this is a bit longer to verify that the post has never been popular if it is old

No hard feelings. The (relative) popularity of my comment tells me I stroke a common pain point here. I guess the solution for this problem worth a fortune.

The article on vaccine from 7 years ago? There are too many virus articles competing for attention to get traction and too much virus fatigue from the spam.

Thanks for this - in case you missed it I created a r/hnblogs subreddit last week to try and make it easier for some of this non-commerical content within the community to be surfaced.

Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/

Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23287286

It's an ongoing experiment, but it's been going well so far and there have been a lot of interesting posts. It's basically people from the HN community, but the submissions are restricted to (your own) personal blog.

If you're relying on manual curation it might be easier to grab things from there (there's an aggregate RSS feed you can get in the sidebar).

Alternate link: https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/

Nice service, thanks.

Might I suggest an international-friendly date format? YYYY-MM-DD is much easier, as an American, for me to process than DD/MM/YY.

YYYYMMDD ordering is also ISO8601 compliant, which is a great reason to use it :)

Even better would be locale-sensitive formatting.

I like this, because sometimes I check Hacker New's New section, and honestly compared to every other site I know of, it's a veritable gold mine of terrific, thoughtful content (compare to reddit's absolute bottom-of-the-barrel, pure filler stuff). So I approve of anything that helps me get through it, and see more excellent content.

I like the idea. Problem:

https://substack.com/privacy

> Through cookies we place on your browser or device, we may collect information about your online activity after you leave our Services.

I would imagine most people who read "new" are themselves just checking on their own submissions, which might bias the type of things upvoted (for example a post on how to get traction on HN might be biased).

Might I suggest a feature that gives all new posts some spot on the front page, even if for just a short while?

We tried that a while back. It didn't go well. Let me see if I can find what I posted about it.

Edit: Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868928. I'm pretty sure I posted about it elsewhere too.

A somewhat related question since you’re here: do you have any ideas for people who don’t really vote to do this kind of dredging? Personally, I tend to use upvote/downvote a lot more cautiously than most people, treating it as some might consider “favorite” or “flag” (in fact, I run into the dilemma on which to use quite frequently; a notable narcissistic exception is that I will upvote my content if it’s posted here). I’d like to be able to mark something as “this is on-topic for Hacker News” but not mark it as “I liked it”, which I can’t really find a button for as upvoting does both…

I agree that "on topic vs. off topic" and "like vs. dislike" are two different signals, and it's possible that "on topic vs. off topic" is actually the more valuable signal for surfacing good stories. But how would we encode this in the UI? The upvote arrow is by now a standard UI mechanism. It isn't obvious how we might factor it into two completely different things.

I check the new section from time to time and I agree with the link you posted that there is a lot of junk/spam in there. It's no surprise that they can't just be randomly put into the main pages.

Having a look at the 15 latest submissions for example. I roughly see: SEO spam, trump spam, a super complex physics paper, 4 well known news site, 3 university websites, VC spam, spam, one pdf download, a couple of articles, etc...

I think HN could do with a "curated new" section besides the general "new" section. A bit of filtering to remove high volume subjects (virus, climate, trump) and to remove major news sites (new york times, bbc and co) and maybe university/paper sites. That should leave room to lower volume sites and personal blogs. Maybe filter to domains that had at least one article with 100 votes in the past years and see what's left.

Well, there's also the flag mechanism for the negative direction. Perhaps there could be a way to flag something as off-topic without filling up the moderator queue?

It seems the major issue was people not expecting this content, or understanding that it was actually “new” and randomly selected.

Why not highlight the post in a different colour, or otherwise make it obvious that this is possibly garbage?

I think that would just add more noise.

Given that unpredictability is key to curiosity (see [1] and [2]), we're very open to ideas about how to make HN's front page more uncorrelated. A suggestion I heard recently was to downweight the most commonly submitted sites (there are lots of different ways one could do this). A common complaint is that there are too many mainstream news articles that are too samey with each other. I'm sympathetic to that too. Anyone want to make more suggestions?

I'm going to downweight this subthread itself, so it doesn't distract too much from polote's Show HN.

[1] The best submissions are ones that you can't predict from any sequence of previous submissions. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] Curiosity abhors repetition. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

In my opinion, the problem is less correlation of articles on the HN front page and more correlation across news sources. A lot of stuff from the NY Times gets to the front page, for instance. What makes that really bad is that there are a lot of stories behind paywalls or that require registration. The discussion is a regurgitation of discussions elsewhere because everyone comments on the title.

I would love it if paywalled/registration required sites would get downweighted so as to encourage a discussion of the article. Another change I'd like would be programming language stories downweighted based on how many other stories on that language recently hit the front page. It's no secret that the latest fad is Rust, and while it's everyone's right to like any language they want, it certainly doesn't increase HN's value to have yet another story about a library update for [language of the week], and a general discussion about [language of the week] rather than about the post.

> I would love it if paywalled/registration required sites would get downweighted so as to encourage a discussion of the article.

That's only a problem when these sites get posted a lot.

Counterpoint: The London Review of Books had a few front page appearances here, it is a site posted quite seldom, it has spectacular articles, and because it's posted so rarely, pretty much everyone who clicks on it will still be within his number of "free articles".

I think that would be reasonable. I expect an outlet like that to have stories with a greater degree of uniqueness.

One idea is to have more human curation of the content posted on /newest.

Currently users don't have much incentive to go through newest and curate/upvote. Adding some badges & special privileges (or just awarding karma) for folks who consistently help curate & discover great content would set the incentives correctly. Essentially, gamify the curation process so the load gets shared.

Ok, assume without loss of generality that we choose karma as the reward mechanism. How do we measure how much karma to give to whom? If it's just for activity on /newest, people will write bots to game it, and we'll end up worse off than before. There needs to be a way to reward doing a good job of selecting stories, but not a bad job. How do you measure a good job?

> How do you measure a good job?

If a story that I upvoted from /newest ends up getting lots of love(=upvotes) on HN then I have done a good job.

For this to work in practice there needs to be /staging. Here's the workflow,

- Karma hungry scavengers (like me) would go to /newest and upvote some interesting stories.

- Some of these stories move to /staging where non-scavengers (yet karma hungry) reads & upvotes the interesting ones.

- After a certain threshold on /staging the story moves to HN homepage.

- If my story makes it to homepage, I should get a % of final story points (say 10%) as a karma bounty. I help community discover great content from a river and I'm directly rewarded in proportion to the quality of content (maybe only after the story crosses a certain threshold).

- People who upvote from /staging should also get a % karma bump (although lower than me).

I know we are basically creating mini-HN with /staging but I'm suggesting this approach based on your past comments about folks's emotional connection to homepage (many people only want to see quality content on homepage).

A simple approach would be to add a short "New" section at the bottom of the frontpage, which shows about 5 semi-randomly chosen submissions from the last few hours that haven't seen much engagement yet.

That would encourage more curation without much effort, but also without too much distraction for users only interested in the top.

Add a toggle to hide the section persistently and everyone should be happy.

We tried that once - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23411356.

You might set a karma ceiling for the reward system, so that it only applies to a particular band of the karma spectrum; the bot is pointless after the threshold has been reached, so there's less incentive to write it.

(I wonder sometimes what things on the site should exclude people based on high karma).

Here’s one idea. Don’t reward anything. Just find a way to remind people that newest exist and send them there more often. Perhaps by putting a link such as “HN new: Please curate new submissions” randomly in place of one normal story on the HN, some percentage of times.

I think HN sometimes push random posts to the bottom of the front page, no?

How about giving less posted sites on HN with more than 2-3 votes priority in that and maybe make it happen more often?

I see you answered that.

I like this suggestion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21869599

Maybe HN needs a new /random or /individual filtering bigger companies and popular paywalls.

We sometimes push posts to the bottom of the front page, but never random posts. Only ones that moderators and/or a small number of story reviewers think that the community might find interesting. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and the links back from there.

If everyone's vote only counted on the story they upvoted that is currently highest ranked we might see more variety in stories as simultaneous stories that share a similar audience are punished.

This would probably increase randomness though. "Awesome rust post" could fail to gain any traction because "Half decent rust post" was already on the front page sucking up the rust developer votes...

I've been reading this for the past few days, it's been really great!

Great idea. I tried subscribing to a 'best of HN' newsletter and set it to be every 2 then 3 days.

Very disappointed with the content that was coming through. Hope this curation remains sustainable.

This is great, already, looking through a few days, I have found more interesting things than the top stuff right now.

Subscribed through RSS

This is a great idea, considering the recent talk around HN about the blogging. Congratulations!

I have a question: for example, yesterday I posted a link to my blog, but was not on yesterday's post. Do you have some rules on what makes it to the list and what doesn't?

Yes there are, in your case, it is a language specific article, which I tend to not keep, but your previous article would have been included for example

I would like to have the possibility to discuss certain posts, that have been flagged to death, because they talk about sex or racism. I know that HN is not the best place for such topics, however I would like to read what HN folks think about it.

Is there some way to do so?

I had a read through the collated articles (and signed up), I already have found a few post that I'm glad that I have read them.

This is a good idea. Thank you for making it!

I don't really appreciate the attempt to collect my email address. When clicking on a link, it's nice to see the content directly.

That's on Substack, not the creator, you can click the "Let me read it first" link to see the articles. What is annoying, and understandable based on your perspective, is that clicking the link doesn't change the URL (it's entirely client side routing) so that OP couldn't have posted just the articles but had to make it show the email form first.

I only see like 10 results? I imagine there are at least 50 non-professional blog posts submitted to HN a day