#1 on HN for Six Hours: Postmortem | Hacker News Reader

#1 on HN for Six Hours: Postmortem

kev.inburke.com

2 pointskevinburke6 comments

Someone should post a "...and crickets chirped" post mortem. Not everyone gets this kind of response here but these seem to be the only post mortems which show up here, giving a skewed impression it seems. Besides, I would rather see an analysis of how and why it made it to the front page and stayed there. Good for you that you got scads of traffic. But seeing a listing of your traffic numbers helps me not at all in terms of figuring out how to replicate it.

Thanks for the feedback. As far as I can tell making the frontpage is about 85% dumb luck, 10% having a good title and 5% having good content, which is maybe why you don't see articles about it :)

In my experience, when someone says "dumb luck" what they really mean is "I have no clue how it happened and this leads me to believe A) no one else does either and B) it isn't possible to figure it out." Even if A happens to be true, B probably is not. ("Dumb luck" is something someone said in my archery class about what it took to hit the target. I could do it. He could not. I practiced two hours a day. He did not. I never saw the phrase the same way again.)

But thanks for the feedback.

I'll think about it some more. I guess I "practice" in that I think about my titles and the good titles I've seen, and I try to write a fair amount, and I submit all of my posts to HN to try and get feedback. I've also been writing blog posts for five or six years now.

I guess I also meant that, maybe there's some underlying chance a post I write will make the frontpage, but it's hard for me to predict in advance which ones will make it. Some of the posts I think are great fall off the 'new' page without an upvote.

I saw an answer on here once about timing from someone who clearly spent scads of time here at the time. So I have reason to believe when something is posted matters and, also, who posts it matters. There are, no doubt, other factors. I would not know what they are.

Have a great evening.

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