Ask HN: How many of you have “repost” on HN?
Just curious how many posters have experienced not seeing good traction on their first post, repost again so they get a chance of getting to the front page.
dang does a lot of work to curate this site. Thanks Dang!
- You repost yourself. It's a different submission with different ID and URL. It gets no special bonus.
- The system automatically reposts your submission. It gets an automatic front page spot (low on the front page), and it drops from the front page quickly if still nobody is interested. The timestamp of your submission is changed, so it looks new (this leads to confusion sometimes).
- You get an email with a special submission link. When you resubmit using that link, it's basically the same as #2, as far as I know.
I still don't really understand the difference between #2 and #3. Maybe #2 is triggered by super-users and #3 by dang? I have no idea.
We're therefore building for ourselves first, but keep an open mind when people who actually do machine learning professionally have problems.
We don't "have an audience" and are not backed by an accelerator, and it's not our 'startup idea' to decide to make this. We've been doing ML profitably for many organizations for many years as a company, and this is our tooling to solve problems we faced on real projects with actual stakes. It has shaved three months on a crurrent project of work we won't have to do, and I optimize for that.
It is in early access mode to have meaningful conversations with people whose problems we're solving.
Most of the times I try a slightly different angle, maybe a variation in the title. It definitely works, in the sense that sometimes you're just unlucky and maybe your post is hidden by big-Co news. I definitely recommend to not exaggerate though, if a post doesn't work, it simply doesn't.
Also, I don't think it's about the algorithm, but I generally see some sort of correlation between me commenting around and my posts getting higher results. It might be that people look at my profile and/or I'm more "in the HN lingo" and thus my posts resonate more. So my recommendation is to participate in the community, not just post + repost blindly.
By the way, I've read the guideline again, but it seems repost is not allowed? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But, no, not really, it sounds reasonable that it would work if done at different times of the day, different amount of traffic and maybe types of people ?