Ask HN: How would you promote a new site that didn't get any notice? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you promote a new site that didn't get any notice?

10 pointsgeuis14 comments

Over the weekend I got inspired to make a live version of Hacker News. I thought people would find it interesting to see the site updating in realtime.

To this end, I created the site and put it online today. I then submitted the link to HN this afternoon, but by the time it rolled off the new page an hour or so later it had 1 additional up vote. I also sent out one tweet about it which didn't get picked up anywhere.

So I wonder if my assumptions about my audience (fellow HN'ers) was wrong. Or perhaps I submitted it at the wrong time of day. Or perhaps the project is just boring to most people.

Here's the site, http://hnlive.trending.us.

How would you go about promoting this?

View on HN

Clickable: http://hnlive.trending.us

A few questions:

* What was your original submission?

* What time of day did you make it?

* How long did it stay on the "newest" page?

* How many people clicked on it?

* What was the title?

These are important questions - knowing the answers shows you thought about your promotion. Not knowing the answers shows you didn't.

And it's now important to think about promoting your links on HN, because of the sheer volume of material now here. If you want something noticed you need to get your title right, pick your time, write something that's immediately eye-catching, and generally market it.

Otherwise it's pure chance, even if it's good.

Original submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2384668

Title "Hacker News Live".

About 11 hours ago.

Stayed on the newest page for roughly an hour.

Google Analytics indicate 52 page views, about 75% bounce rate. Much of that might have been me personally as I was getting everything working.

Simple observation - you needed either to point to a page that explained the problem your potential users have that you are solving, or you needed to do that in a comment to your own submission. People could easily have clicked on it and just thought - "Huh - can't see what this does that's different" - and closed.

It doesn't do anything special for me because I do my HN borwsing on a very elderly machine that can't understand anything new or fancy. I may actually be mis-interpreting the site because it degrades gracefully and I don't see anything special - maybe it looks completely different on a modern browser.

But you need to get people to recognise their pain - then take it away. Your submission here didn't do that.

Thanks ROG. Good advice.

I took a little extra effort to make sure hnlive matches the native style as closely as possible, just without tables. Basically every 10 seconds or so, if there are changes in votes/comments/position the page updates.

Its built on node.js and uses socket.io to maintain the open connection to the backend.

For HN, a story of what you've done, what technology you used, what problems you had, and how you solved them, is at least as interesting as the product itself. Then people might look at it for a bit to evaluate what you've done, and maybe get hooked. From what you say, I would consider using it, if only my browser supported it.

Hope that helps.

It's an interesting idea. Perhaps I'll replace my Speed Dial for HN with this one so I don't have to keep refreshing the page.

One comment: Your date and twitter area on the right don't like narrow windows. Once the date hits the "submit" area it drops the next line and messes up the layout.

Fixing the date issue as we speak.

Cool site! Nice work.

It would add a little oomph if you could add some sort of subtle visual tracking (in the CSS for example) to highlight the stuff that moves. Between refreshes it's often hard to see what's changing.

Well personally for me , its more of a novelty. I don't sit on HN all day to actively want to see things change in real time.

Yeah, I agree with this. It is essentially a novelty site I built in a couple of nights. I wonder if this is part of the issue.

I guess you are using HN-Proxy (https://github.com/matthusby/HN-Proxy). Be careful with Google -- proxying sites might flag your site as spam (although I guess you're not going to drive a lot of traffic from Google anyway).

Nope, this is all node.js. The scraper hits the homepage every 10 seconds or so with a generous fallback timing if a non 200 response is received. Have to be nice to the server. The response is then parsed into an object using node-jquery.

Client rendering is handled via Express. The object is passed through the jqtpl rendering engine. Results are then cached for initial page loads, and separately for socket.io updates.

Nope, this is all node.js. The scraper hits the homepage every 10 seconds or so with a generous fallback timing if a non 200 response is received. Have to be nice to the server.

The response is then parsed into a json object using node-jquery

akkartik made something similar - http://hackerstream.com.

He's been experimenting with promoting his site. Perhaps you should talk to him?

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