Show HN: Soliciting post placement on Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Soliciting post placement on Hacker News

11 pointsDoches12 comments

Hey, HN -- I just received the following email and I'm not sure what to do about it. Obviously I want to discourage requested-posting like this; is there some structured way that we can do that? One of the things I love about HN is how high the signal-to-noise ratio is relative to...pretty much the rest of the internet.

I wouldn't ordinarily call someone out like this, but I want to innoculate HN against this sort of thing.

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Hey doches,

Not sure if it's conventional, but thought I'd ask anyway.

Would you be open to posting about my product on Hacker News?

I understand that similar to Product Hunt, HN gives higher priority to users with higher karma. I usually keep up with recent discussions via RSS feed on Feedly, but almost neve post. So I thought I'd reach out to someone that has authority.

My product is called Popupular and it helps embed just about anything into a popup via a Google Chrome extension.

[rest of email truncated]

No, that's not how Hacker News works. Karma is essentially meaningless after 501 karma and does not affect post placement.

Yep, they are just taking advantage of people's ignorance.

The startup of the week is always hiring a marketing manager to promote their site and they are always baffled why get blocked posting an endless stream of articles from their own blog.

If you participate in HN like a real HN user (posting articles from a variety of sources that sometimes get voted up) that's the best you can do. If you do that you can slip an occasional link to your own site and people might vote for it... IF they find it interesting.

That's a big IF for a lot of people.

You can also just post links to your own site only. No need to post other stuff just to get a varied post history. As long as the submissions are relevant to HN they'll get upvoted.

I watch the "new" page a lot and something I see a lot is that marketing manager asking why his posts are going to dead right away. It's nthat there's a filter that suppresses people who keep posting links from the same site.

It absolutely drives that person nuts but by definition that person is ignorant and not part of the community.

Some accounts/domains do get shadowbanned for only linking to their own content.

I don't think we have the full picture over how these things work, and I believe HN's official policy is that the details are deliberately vague to stop front-page gaming. For example, we know that mods have a role in curating the front page, but we don't know enough of the details to simulate the mechanics.

What's the chance that this is actually the way to get front-page placement for the product since it's in the post? How many are going to read this and check out this extension now?

That is some 4 dimensional chess right there

I'm not sure high karma gets you anything on HN. I'm in the thousands and most of my posts go down the memory hole.

Well looks like it kinda worked anyway, I went and looked up Popupular since you included it in your post!

You can respond:

> I understand that similar to Product Hunt, HN gives higher priority to users with higher karma.

That's not true. Best of luck :)

You could always email Dang. He might be able to give you better guidance than we can.

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