How To Get On The Frontpage of Hacker News

You've got to face the fact that the average person who creates web pages is clueless about how to get traffic. It's harder in 2012 than it's ever been -- and it's just going to get harder when Facebook and Twitter realize that it's a matter of life and death for them to stop giving web sites free traffic.

If you're going to be successful, you've got to be aggressive, but you don't want to be like all the people selling e-books and penis pills either.

My favorite tactic HN, lifted from reddit, is the headline that makes an absurd and overblown claim. If you can get a high clickthrough when people see the "new" page, that's a big help.

So far as voting rings go, it's hard for me to believe that HN isn't already strongly affected by them. I can think of so many second rate blogs that consistently make the front page. These aren't terrible content, but nothing special, and they don't deserve the level of attention they get.

The most obnoxious thing about HN is that when certain controversial topics come up (say there was a really provocative article on text editors) we see a surge of people writing "me too" blog posts and replies and then we get six or seven of those on the front page.

That's a hell of a lot worse than the occasional guy who spends his nights and weekends for six months developing a project who wants a little publicity on HN because he's completely shut out of TechCrunch because he's geographically challenged.

I agree with you in principle - good content is what makes HN great. That said:

"you need to write something interesting"

As long as you include the link title as the most important bit your write. Unfortunately, hits, votes and comments are often largely based on the title. In many cases the actual article is not even read.

I agree that you shouldn't game the system... but to be perfectly honest, good shit sometimes doesn't rise because there is an insider crew on HN. Not saying it's bad, just the truth. The post is helping just get noticed. 10 upvotes total is not going to keep you on HN frontpage forever, but it will get you noticed and then if you wrote something good it will stay there and move organically. All I'm saying is the first 30 minutes is the most important time and just put yourself in a position to get on the frontpage and in front of people.

I am wondering the same thing. I have HN RSS in Google Reader. If I liked the post, I will click the comments link which takes me here. I will then upvote. Doesn't make a lot of sense if I have to go out to the front page and search for it (if its even there) to get the upvote to count.

;)