Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

171 pointsjannesblobel231 comments

When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”

What I find strange is that Hacker News feels oddly opaque. I’ve never met anyone who can clearly explain how it works in practice. Not just the rules, but the dynamics: what’s repeatable, what’s luck, and what actually matters.

By using the Kevin Bacon-number idea: I can usually get within three degrees of separation of well-known technologists like Linus Torvalds, but I can’t seem to get within three steps of someone who confidently understands how HN works.

So I’m asking sincerely: Does anyone here feel they understand Hacker News? If so, what are the real levers, and what do people consistently misunderstand?

PS: This question comes from a mix of genuine curiosity and personal frustration. I’m honestly trying to understand how HN works in practice.

View on HN

HN is hard to game on purpose. So stop looking for the levers and participate, that's all there is to it. I've made friends here, have been helped by people on projects that I was busy with, did the reverse, found friends and business partners and spend way too much time. HN is a very interesting slice of the online world, a place that is unlike the rest, sometimes a bit dry but always interesting and extremely useful. If you're looking at it to try to understand it then you might as well try to understand a rat or a mouse. You won't understand it because it isn't there to be understood, it just is, like any other organism.

The root of HN is a thing called 'startup news', that was changed very quickly and since then HN has been a focal point for techies of all sorts but also lots of other people from all walks of life and from a large variety of countries. It isn't 'one thing' to everybody that participates, just like a hammer is a different thing for a carpenter than it is for a masoner or a farmer.

The fact that after being a member for a couple of years you have this question indicates a lack of participation, not a lack of understanding.

First two sentences are key. The reason why HN is so much better than other fora (IMO) is that the mods don't allow lever-pulling and astroturfing to overtake regular contributions. Yet it's also popular, so you're bound to get some activity on most posts.

Sure, it can be frustrating if you're trying to promote a product or farm karma on posts. But the fact that mostly nobody cares about karma means that you can post something and have it be evaluated on its technical, economic, social merits.

Obviously, there are caveats to this - i.e., anything US- and FAANG-related is bound to get much more activity than otherwise - but the overall atmosphere of HN is refreshing compared to Reddit.

How do you know they don't? How can you show this? It's fine if it's just vibes but just want to know what is known and can be said.

The mods are active (and have even commented in this thread) and have a clearly stated set of objectives:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46309399

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I can't know for sure. For me, it's just the "eyeball method" of comparing HN and different subreddits on Reddit.

As to how I (or anyone) could show this, here are a few example questions:

1. How many examples of stealthy but otherwise blatant promotion do you see in the comments? Not every astroturfing campaign will be successful or original, so you'd be able to notice some patterns. Plus, HN is already commercially oriented, and there's the "Show HN" option, so it reduces the incentives for astroturfing.

2. Alternatively, how much controversy is there around the specific type of forum? For some subreddits, for example, you'd be able to see counter-subreddits popping up when participants feel the mods are abusing their power to promote one type of opinion.

3. Is a certain type of political/brand-related opinion or interpretation always at the top of your comment feed? For example, if upvotes determine the order of the comments, do you consistently see fewer critical comments on things that you'd expect the community to react to in different ways.

4. Do you consistently see some contributors having more power in discussions over others? Other than the mods, obviously. If this is the case, karma (i.e., number of upvotes) often has more value.

Still, I could be wrong.

I'd be shocked if this site was never manipulated by its owners to influence opinion in their benefit.

I'd be shocked if it were because the owners now this is a fragile thing and one word from Dan or Tom that this is or was the case and half the participants here would walk. The owners are more than likely well aware of that risk and are not going to destroy the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Check out the treatment PG (and Garry Tan) got in the thread about defending YC's effective investment into Installmonetizer for a good example of news.ycombinator.com's response to such crap.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711

Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.

Its also the currently last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.

You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.

> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies.

That's up to you, really, you can just ignore them. I know I do.

> So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.

Probably, or maybe that is just an overly cynical take. If it were as bad as that I can think of a couple of very easy things they could do to improve on that and they aren't so for now I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Note that I'm not particularly impressed by anybody associated with YC except the mods here.

> Its also the last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.

So you're saying there is hope for Haskell?

> You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.

There are some pretty funny instances of such interaction here, the best of which still has me in stitches after more than a decade.

What do you think is the purpose of news.YCOMBINATOR.com, if it’s not to promote(and make $$$$$) ycombinator?

I am not asking how you use it. I am asking what you believe is the reason the site operator is running it.

Not everything has to have an explicit purpose beyond “this is a good and valuable thing”.

Why do I take in parcels for my neighbour if a courier knocks on my door? She doesn’t pay me. It wouldn’t cause me any harm if I didn’t. But it makes the place nicer to live, and I’ve become friends with her as a result.

She invited me to dinner recently and fed me delicious food, and we drank very good champagne. That was an unexpected bonus.

“To promote ycombinator” only works if there’s an audience worth promoting to. Building something great that brings people back day after day maybe has the result that it can also serve as a promotional tool - but that’s a bonus, not necessarily a purpose.

I’m not the person you asked the question of - but I think the purpose of ycombinator is to give relevant people a place to discuss things aligned with the ecosystem in which ycombinator operates, to help strengthen and champion that ecosystem. Does it have a payoff for ycombinator? Almost certainly. Was it created with that explicit purpose in mind? I doubt it. There are easier ways to make money.

They started it for particular reasons, which can be examined. It's not bad that they did so, but your purpose and what the GP said are basically the same thing.

They're not promoting startups to investors via HN, it's a different kind of promotion. But 'pool of eligible hires' is quite worth a few salaries to maintain, even if others get value from it.

There’s a piece here, written by Paul Graham, which talks about why he started hacker news, written two years after it was launched.

If we take what he wrote at face value, I don’t think the purpose was primarily its promotional value.

https://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

_ Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news._

_ Hacker News is an experiment, and an experiment in a very young field. Sites of this type are only a few years old. Internet conversation generally is only a few decades old. So we've probably only discovered a fraction of what we eventually will._

_ Hacker News is definitely useful. I've learned a lot from things I've read on HN. I've written several essays that began as comments there. So I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time._

> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.

Everything has a cost. For the web, that's typically monetary or your data and attention to advertisers. I think you're right that the cost of Hacker News is that my participation is lending some (tiny incremental) legitimacy to Y Combinator. It's also costing some tiny amount of my attention, in the sense that I may not have heard of Y Combinator if it weren't for Hacker News. For me personally, that is absolutely fine – but I'm glad you made it explicit so that it's a conscious choice.

[Edit: Of course it costs an absolutely vast amount of my attention :-) but I mean only a teeny tiny fraction of that is "payment" in the sense of noticing that Y Combinator exists.]

This. That level of reach is part of what makes it amazing. I have a chance to 'talk' with people, who are levels above me in technical realm.

Reddit is significantly more popular/successful than HN even for tech.

HN is its own little world and that’s fine.

Popular isn't necessarily good, and success can be measured in many different ways.

But to exclude popularity from the definition of success is highly atypical, at best.

"My son is a successful artist, and like Van Gogh he's only ever sold one piece of art in his life" said no mother ever.

Now post mortem, Van Gogh has certainly "enjoyed" more success, by many peoples' rankings.

It is certainly true that one of the ways in which success can be measured is sales.

What is Y Combinator's HN selling? Are they successful in that effort?

HN isn't selling anything, but without HN the founder feed would likely dry up (or maybe not, now they have critical mass) and eventually of course they're selling stock.

Theres 3 (4?) horse men of online communities.

1 Identity topics, eg: Politics/Religion

2 Insufficient moderation

3 NSFW content

4 Inability to distinguish experienced commenters or valid content from plausible sounding content. I.E. Low Subject Expertise thresholds.

4 is what keeps a community boring, while keeping the SNR high.

I tried in vain to understand what centaur-like men had to do with your point.

"Horsemen", as in the Apocalyptic Tetrad?

> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies

I should probably clarify this a bit.

It's true that HN sponsors Launch HNs (and Show HNs) by YC startups. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. However, YC would not be funding HN if that were the only reason for it. It's a secondary factor.

Far more important than promoting existing startups is attracting founders who might start new startups. This requires an entirely different strategy than promotion: it requires being interesting enough to attract the right kind of users. That's why the site is organized around curiosity, as I explained elsewhere in the current thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46309399).

For more on this, here are past explanations:

optimizing for curiosity - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

relationship between HN and YC's business interests - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

I interpreted their comment more along the lines of

“Don’t critique ycombinator companies or go against their interests, otherwise you’re fine”

YC companies and their founders have special privileges on here and there is an opaque moderation system. There is no data you could provide beyond full transparency into your entire organization(obviously not happening) that would convince anyone that there isn’t influence that they have over communication here

Apart from job postings and Launch HNs, YC-funded startups don't have access to any information or influence that isn't available to anyone else.

We literally give exactly the same information and help to YC-funded startups as we do to non-YC-funded startups who ask for assistance with their Show HNs. That's because giving “extra help” to YC-funded startups is far less valuable (to everyone including the startup themselves [1]) than just making HN interesting to readers and showcasing cool projects, no matter who has built them.

[1] More than almost anything else, what I've learned from moderating HN is that “extra help” to get onto the front page of HN is of barely any help at all. That is, if the post isn't interesting enough to earn significant numbers of upvotes and good comments very quickly, it will disappear off the front page very quickly. Also, any time a story is on the front page that the community doesn’t think belongs there, it feels off and attracts flags and complaints.

> There is no data you could provide beyond full transparency into your entire organization(obviously not happening) that would convince anyone that there isn’t influence that they have over communication here

Since you're in a subthread of my comment: I've been here for many years and have not seen any evidence that would convince me that you are right.

And I trust both Dan and Tom to speak truthfully on this matter, they are truthful in their interaction with the community and I see no reason why this would be any different. And if it were different and if you did find proof that it is different then I don't know of HN would be for me anymore.

It is always important to realize that when you write words like 'anyone' that you are speaking for yourself.

You are correct. I will walk back the term “anyone” and amend it to “anyone who doesn’t personally trust the employees/mods of the organization and doesn’t assume that an organization involved in investments and VC firms will act with the same level of self interest as everyone else in that industry”

I am obviously very skeptical of any group like this, but not to the point where I would claim a stance like yours is definitionally incorrect. I’m just personally never going to have trust without the transparency given past history

I have some evidence that might sway you: there have been many threads on here that are critical of YC backed companies, sometimes pretty pointy ones.

For those threads flagging is turned off not on. So YC companies actually have it harder on HN than non-YC companies very specifically to avoid the accusation of bias.

I've also seen people associated with YC backed companies here downvoted into the toilet for spouting unpopular opinions. The only thing that possibly could happen (and that would be fairly hard to detect) is brigading on a company level, but I would accuse the likes of Google and Apple of that long before I would do so with the YC mods. Think about the opportunity cost of moderating this site. If you take that into account and then combine what you know of Dan and Tom with them selling out their integrity for a pittance if it would come to light that they did so it would wreck their reputation, which is pretty much the only compensation they really get here.

So I'm not buying it and I'm more skeptical of YC than most on here.

There is zero evidence that would sway me other than full transparency into all company records, which I recognize as an implausible ask.

I do not trust companies, or any organization involved in their creation and investment like this forum, to speak honestly and openly.

They have an incentive not to and their peers have proven time and time again that this incentive is too enticing to avoid.

I have seen and taken part in threads on here that were negative for ycombinator and/or their business partners be removed at almost machine level speed.

Maybe it’s the company, maybe it’s the community opinion, maybe it’s another option that I didn’t anticipate.

Regardless I assume it’s the company because they have not proven otherwise and companies in the American business setting are guilty until proven innocent to me.

Don't underestimate the power of brigading. If a couple of YC founders on YC's internal forum (much like HN) decide to get together there isn't much the moderators of HN can do about it other than to act retro-actively.

You'll see the same happen whenever someone is critical of some deity or brand (say, Steve Jobs or Apple). This is a generic problem, and it is a hard one to solve.

I've always been a fan of analyzing all of the flags retro-actively to see if they were just or not and to have a per-subject matrix that would weigh flags from particular users. So anybody that is on the gravy train at apple would find their apple flagging permissions removed, and all YC combinator founders would have their ability to flag YC related threads removed. But that is a lot of work to implement and keep accurate.

I don’t care about all those signs/flags? Is probably the best I can express my feelings.

I assume anything corporate or corporate aligned, which I believe this forum is, is being manipulated by the owners because they are structurally unreliable.

Corporations are counter parties who will betray you the second it’s in their benefit, and then crow about it in their quarterly earnings reports to their shareholders.

They’ll have their pocket MBAs and lawyers tell you how they have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns and quote some fucking 1920s era lawsuit with Henry Ford despite not actually having to maximize return but just having to do what’s in the shareholders best interests.

The sociopaths in our society have determined that means getting more money even if other people are harmed.

I am going to continue assuming that any corporate aligned org is following the incentives of our societal structure until we change that, and if you try to convince me I should ignore the structural incentives then I am going to assume you are trying to pull the wool over my eyes.

> if you try to convince me I should ignore the structural incentives then I am going to assume you are trying to pull the wool over my eyes.

It won't be long now and you'll accuse me of being part of the YC cabal...

(I'm a mod here)

It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks.

But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are links to past explanations about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

We try to elevate things that gratify curiosity: creative work, surprising discoveries, deep dives, technical achievements, unusual personal experience, whimsical unpredictability, good conversation, etc. And we try to demote things that run against curiosity, especially repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion.

It gets complicated because you'll also see plenty of repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion on HN—alas! This is the internet after all. But the site survives because the balance of these things stays within tolerable ranges, thanks to two factors: an active community which cares greatly about preserving this place for intended purpose (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html); and an owner (Y Combinator) that pays us to work on the site full time and mainly just wants us to keep it good, to the extent possible.

If you really want to figure this place out, the way to do it is as a reader. Hang out on the site, look at the mix of articles that make the frontpage, spend time in the discussion threads (hopefully the interesting sectors and not the flamey ones!), and over time your eyes will adjust.

What doesn't work—and this is good because we want it not to work—is approaching HN as a platform for promoting content. If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, but anyone) mainly care about "how can I use this thing to get attention for my startup/blog/project/newsletter", then you're operating in 'push' mode rather than 'pull' mode (or 'idle' mode, which is even better). In that case you won't be curious because you're too focused on what you're wanting for extraneous reasons—and if you aren't in a state of curiosity, this place won't make sense. At least we hope it won't!

Obviously all of what dang said, but I want to add that I think timing is an additional factor.

If you post when silicon valley wakes up on a weekday, you might get “initial” points faster, which leads to your submission being ranked higher up for a while and being more discoverable.

Interesting stuff but we should keep these secrets otherwise people will try to game this system :)

That (\/) (;,,;) (\/) I’m helping! feeling upon discovering a mod has bumped one of your 04:00 UTC “oh, this is interesting” posts that nobody else saw.

A great take, and thanks for your all hard work dang.

Yesterday the top comment on two stories I went to discuss had deep and meaningful content, before the last line which was a "and I talk about this stuff all the time on my newsletter [link]", and I was conflicted. Same poster each time.

The poster had done the HN thing: responded with thoughtful examination of TFA, unique and interesting insight, and I don't feel it was AI generated.

And then they marred it. They pushed something just slightly out of context. Not entirely, just a smidge.

I hope we can keep an eye on that sort of thing around here, it feels like it could slide into something...

Not a mod, but I do hope you flag comments like that. Dang is awesome, but it is user moderation that makes a giant difference.

Done.

You flagged an otherwise good comment because it linked out to a newsletter?

Not the GP, but, yeah, because it is still a form of spam.

If it's only a link to a newsletter, sure. And "signing" a comment breaks a norm here. But if it's otherwise a good comment, seems like a poor use of "flag"; one of the rare instances where maybe you want to leave a short, polite note ("don't sign off with links to your newsletter, we don't sign things here").

Flagging deprives everyone else of the comment, and is especially hostile if there's already a thread sprouting from that comment.

It's really contextual so... maybe? A good comment that just happens to do it once, likely not. But OP saw it multiple times in a short time from the same user, so probably.

Constant self promotion is what is hurting so many other platforms, I'd hate to see this one take even a step in that direction.

I have a different take. If someone uses effort to post something genuinely interesting just so they can advertise their blog, good. You don't have to click the link, and it's better than nothing (assuming other comments here aren't as interesting).

Like https://xkcd.com/810/

That is one xkcd which I feel has aged exceptionally poorly.

Cf: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46303291>.

Yeah, this "btw I have a newsletter here" seems overly promotional. HN as a forum doesn't have support for "signatures", then it feels a bit off to end every post with something not really relevant.

The grey area is people constantly linking to their own blog, but the linked post is relevant (example [0]). Like, it's good when people post relevant links to diver deeper, but when it's constantly your own content, that irks me a bit.

[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> [0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

simonw is a smart guy, definitely an HN darling for anything LLM related nowadays but at the same time he is constantly pushing for his personal brand, IMO. Maybe unconsciously and just because he is very prolific but still, I get that feeling.

He writes because he loves writing. People can tell, and thus like reading it. If that creates a "brand", there's not much he can do about it. He's an active, valuable, good-faith participant here, has a subject matter expertise in something HN obviously cares very deeply about, and isn't going anywhere.

Agreed. Simonw comments and posts are always on discussion and insightful. Never once have they come off as some sort of linkedin influencer bs.

I'm not denying that, in fact I think it's basically because he writes a lot and participates a lot. But yet, it can give the feeling that he is curating his own brand. But probably it's just an organic thing, not a fabricated one.

It's an extraordinarily rude thing to say about an HN regular with a long track record of constructive participation.

I don't think I have been rude at all, and also seniority does not give any special authority over opinions.

My point was that the "creating the personal brand" part - which can seem something intentional - is just a byproduct of posting, writing and contributing. And he contributes because he has knowledge, opinions and things to say.

It's like writing your own blog with good content and getting organic traffic from search engines vs writing SEO content to get traffic and get noted.

Maybe I initially expressed myself not the way I really wanted.

I'll be honest and blunt: I try to avoid his blog posts and comments as much as possible because I do find his contributions to be super spammy. It's about the frequency of his self-promotion (as a researcher in NLP it's tiresome to constantly see his self-promotion on nearly all posts on HN related to LLMs). Seems I'm not the only one.

If he posted on the ML subreddit while I was still a mod there (left after the API kerfuffle) I would have messaged him and asked him politely to tone it down.

Where by "self promotion" you mean "sharing his thoughts"?

I have no issue with simonw's work/comments; I've never gone near it because it's far afield from my non-tech world. He is, though, someone who breaks one HN guideline:

>Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

His submissions here are usually to his own work. Admittedly, that HN guideline is like an obscure 19th-century law which is still on the books that few know of and is never enforced. Even so, he's clearly well-regarded based on the amount of conversation his blog posts elicit.

I don't know why he would bother submitting any of his own pieces --- they're all going to get submitted anyways.

[flagged]

His LLM tool rules. I cite it too. Used it a bunch earlier this year for the municipal data work I was donig. Why wouldn't he cite it? Avoiding these kinds of mean-spirited criticisms would require him to twist himself into a pretzel. I'd rather we just all agree not to say shit like this.

Why can't the thoughts be shared here, though, instead of always a link "to read more" somewhere else?

To read my full comment to you, visit my webpage.

Looking at the examples, each one goes to a different post that is relevant to the discussion. For me that's fine.

I'd be unhappy if it's always the same link, for example to the top of his blog. Or different post to slightly related topics.

The appropriate place to link to your website, newsletter, whatever is on your bio page (which people have to actively click into, specifically because they want to know more about you and potentially find such links).

I agree that linking to your own work in comments is generally bad form.

> Yesterday the top comment on two stories I went to discuss had deep and meaningful content, before the last line which was a "and I talk about this stuff all the time on my newsletter [link]", and I was conflicted. Same poster each time.

In my opinion, if they put thought into a deep and meaningful answer, then I think that's fine. If they say "Oh yeah I talked about this in my blog [link]" that's totally different.

Just by reading through all the comments and input under that post — “I know that I know nothing.” — Socrates

A lot of the comments and input here make sense. I’ll follow your advice and observe HN for a while, looking for interesting topics that suit me.

> If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, but anyone)

"The royal you"

Or the “you, the great unwashed”. Although there is no rule enforcing mutual exclusion.

I've used that construct a lot over the years and it seems to help:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

One can simply employ 'one' if one fears not the air of pretentiousness.

Yes I agree with your comment, as you say I feel like the author of this post is trying to game the system for their "investors" and I do feel like it doesnt get into the ethos of hackernews

Purpose of hackernews as you said is fulfilling curiosity, its not a place where people should try to post to get eyeballs or something because their investors said so.

Honestly hackernews to me is a place where tinkering as a hobby is appreciated. I have read so many large threads here and ended up sometimes having a new point of view on something and so many posts here which make me want to be curious and tinker around too. I cannot really name something exactly which clicks on hackernews but that is what makes it unique and this does mean I cannot explain it to others sometimes since my hobbies are tangential to hackernews too, I just end up saying my hobby is tinkering with computers (currently only software)

Thank you, dang. Your forum is the best one on the internet, and it's in no small part thanks to your moderation efforts.

I like that, this really is Dan's forum by now. Maybe YC should gift wrap it and make it a nice Christmas present.

I was going to say, isn't "(I'm a mod here)" kind of an understatement? Oida, he has a pager for it.

Is "oida" here a Greek word or a typo or something else?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BC%B6%CE%B4%CE%B1

"Dude".

The secret to HN is to read it long enough to realize "dang" is a moderator (used to be the moderator).

Then you can unlock posting when you realize it's "dan g" not "darn it, dang".

dang, what a great answer.

Would you be open to making changes that improve the accessibility, without changing the fundamental setup of HN? I’m not proposing a redesign, but for example the textarea I’m typing in has no label (visible or invisible) and the table layout structure could be at least marked as presentational. Unfortunately, regardless of their curiosity, groups of people are finding it harder than necessary to gratify it at HN.

Yes. It's just a matter of finding the cycles to work on it, or even to process other people's generous contributions. I've got so many posts backed up in the inbox about that, staring reproachfully at me. One of these days (er, years) we'll do some serious work on that level.

Obviously up to you, but I’d be happy to help; this is my specialism and I’ve had a bunch of value out of HN over the years.

Honest question: was an LLM involved in writing this comment? The em-dash style stood out to me

> Honest question: was an LLM involved in writing this comment? The em-dash style stood out to me

The use of em dashes looks pretty natural to me. This is how they were used before LLMs, and what LLMs learned from.

Em dashes have a useful place in written language. I hope we will not lose their utility because people treat them as enough of a signal on their own to automatically question the authenticity of absolutely well-written pieces of text, without giving the matter any further consideration.

The reason em dashes raise suspicion isn't usually because of the lack of utility, it's because they're not easy to type.

They're easy to type on macOS and iOS, which covers quite a large fraction of users

Human user of em dashes here. I can't tell you the number of times people thought my 100% human-made prose was "AI" because of the em dashes.

"Dan" is an LLM. Did you not know that?

Not sure if this is intentional, but "DAN" (Do anything now) was a cute bit of chatbot internet history lol.

Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 - Aug 2025 (266 comments)

+ honorary mentions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053933 (Aug 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27787448 (July 2021)

Hey Dang, I really appreciate all the work you guys are doing.

However, I feel like there's a lot more repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion on HN in the last few months than there has ever been.

I feel like every other thread on here devolves into an unhinged rant about AI, enshittification, privacy, or crazy conspiracy theories about age restrictions on social media and the politicians passing them (which I'm personally a staunch opponent of). It's all the same arguments over and over, most of them without a shred of evidence. It feels like people aren't arguing in good faith any more, we're all just screaming our politics at (or past) each other. This didn't use to be the case.

(yes I know I have showdead on, those are not the dead comments).

I'll give you my take on this but it's just my personal take: I think you're right and wrong—right because HN does go through these waves, but wrong because it's a fluctuation process that stays fairly steady in the long run. (At least we're determined to keep it so, if we can - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

That's why people have been experiencing this "HN has gotten a lot more $BAD-QUALITY recently" since pretty much the origin of the site.

I’ve been posting here for a decade, and lurking for a few years before that, and your observation tracks with my experience. There’s a handful of ideas we’re collectively mulling over at any given time. They slowly rotate in and out, and modulate into different keys as they go. For instance, the leading edge of LLM related discourse seems to be improving now that we’re getting bored with both hype and outrage, although there’s still plenty of hype and outrage. Old topics still occasionally blip into focus, but they don’t have the same staying power. Like, you’ll see a Rails post every now and then, but it’s not the darling it was. I doubt we’ll ever see the likes of “Rails is a Ghetto” make the rounds again, because nobody’s worked up about it any more. Or take Skrillex, who must have been on the front page every week for a month. I was annoyed at the time, but I think we’re due for a retrospective on programmers and dubstep. I’m not the one to write it though; not my scene in the first place.

Anyway, thank you dang for your moderation!

> (I'm a mod here)

Are there any other mods besides you?

Also it just occured to me, is dang one person or a account the represents all mods?

There are other mods.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558671

Mods have never shared an account - that never felt right to me. But Tom was working on HN for years before he started posting publicly as a mod. That change happened with the announcement you linked to.

This is basically admitting to gross manipulation and even censorship by "we're optimizing for", "we try to elevate", and "we try to demote things", which looks to be based on personal or corporate biases and tastes.

Hacker News can only be "figured out", relative to what looks like the biases and financial interests of ownership and its staff, where they do the "pushing" (elevating) and "demoting". This "state of curiosity" being referred to, appears to include wanting readers to blindly accept what is fed to them, and ignore or not question strange inconsistencies.

Newcomers and outsiders would usually be expecting transparency, honesty, and impartiality. Their confusion, can be when they notice the difference in moderation based on adhering to a clear and obvious standard versus the hidden, strange, inexplicable, or unequal treatment.

HN has always been a curated site [1]. That's all that "we try to elevate X and demote Y" means. The frontpage is produced by a combination of community, software, and moderation [2]. All three are necessary - without any one of these, the site would be a completely different place.

Despite how dark and sinister you've made everything sound, you've mostly just rephrased what I wrote, with a lot of pejoratives. In that sense, you're right—there isn't much disagreement here. You just think we're wrong and bad to run HN the way we do, and that's fine.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It sometimes blows my mind how questions which essentially boil down to "How do I best manipulate you for personal gain?" can be asked in such an unabashed fashion.

Hello, fellow nerds! How do you recruit other nerds? They mostly seem to be into their own thing. How can I energize engagement?

> They mostly seem to be into their own thing. How can I energize engagement?

You jest, but the best way is to give the nerds only a feed and don't allow any other organizing principles for navigating the content. Lured by the promise of something interesting sometimes, people who are trying to follow their curiosity for math/archaeology will stumble into threads about corporations and products, throw ideas out in public for free, get sucked into politics, etc etc

> "When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: 'Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.'" ... "If so, what are the real levers, and what do people consistently misunderstand?"

There are no "levers". People come to HN to discuss nerdy topics and those that have come to HN to help make those discussions more informed and interesting are welcome. Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately. And we are certainly not here to be a gauge of interest to any investors.

The one semi-exception is Show HN, which is intended to showcase something interesting that users can play with. There are separate specific guidelines for Show HN submissions (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and tips from the site moderators (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638). Do note that among the tips is the following "Drop any language that sounds like marketing or sales. On HN, that is an instant turnoff. Use factual, direct language. Personal stories and technical details are great." If you have questions about the guidelines or tips, the site moderators can be reached through the email on the contact page linked at the bottom of the page.

> There are no "levers".

Everyone wants to believe that their community doesn't have levers. But this is just wishful thinking, ego talking. Of course HN has levers, of course the community here can be manipulated.

The easiest way I can see would be to frame a helpful, curious question to which your service just happens to be the answer. So then you most an Ask HN like "can anyone help me to understand why people do X" followed by a few sentences of your thoughts, then at the end say "I've been working on a service to help with this but we don't seem to be getting much to traction, here's a link".

Another approach would be "nerd sniping". Post your site but don't mention anything about what it's for and instead say "I'm having a problem with SSR rendering with NextJS on my site" or something like that. You'll get massive engagement.

This says more about you than about HN I think.

Obviously anything can be manipulated, but HN has been remarkably resilient and if there is one thing the collective here is good at then it is at spotting patterns, even over a longer period of time. And once your business is banned from here there isn't really a way back in.

"The easiest way I can see would be to frame a helpful, curious question to which your service just happens to be the answer. So then you most an Ask HN like "can anyone help me to understand why people do X" followed by a few sentences of your thoughts, then at the end say "I've been working on a service to help with this but we don't seem to be getting much to traction, here's a link"."

Nah, that would be obvious marketing to most. More sneaky would be answering the question with the recommendation from a different account in a way to promote your service and have that upvoted, but that requires more effort and skill I assume.

But in general yes, this community definitely can also be manipulated, but I would say it is one of the hardest to fool. The standard mentality here I actually would rather describe as critical instead of curious, but there is just lots of garbage being pushed and also my curiosity is limited.

I love your nerd sniping idea. Literally, I used that same term in my post before I saw yours!

This makes me think of a fun idea: Once a year on HN (April Fool's Day?), we can have a nerd sniping competition where commercial projects try to nerd snipe HN readers with submarine adverts.

Ask HN is a distinctly bad way to drive engagement for a business through HN. Not a good lever. I agree that there are levers, though.

People trying that usually use freshly created accounts or accounts that have zero / low activity except to promote their service. It sticks out like a sore thumb. I could point to a couple of examples right now.

Is there an easy way to show top 10 "Show HN" posts (by upvotes and/or comments) in the last one year? That might help this person to see what works on HN. I expect the list to have no obvious patterns except that they are wildly nerdy or unexpectedly useful. To be clear, I am not suggesting this list to make it easier for the original poster to manipulate the HN system. The readers here are way too discerning to be easily fooled by something obviously commercial appearing under the "Show HN" banner.

Two people that come to mind that normally generate an enormous number of upvotes and discussion are blog posts from Alyssa Rosenzweig (Asahi Linux GPU drivers) and Justine Tunney (Cosmopolitan Libc). Both of those projects trigger near-superhuman levels of nerd sniping (https://xkcd.com/356/). Few nerds can resist!

Final note: To me, this question feels like the "uncanny valley" of nerd discussion boards. Can you imagine posting something similar to LWN.net trying to figure out how to get your commercial project featured in a story?

> There are no "levers".

I disagree, there are always levers. But the "comfort-zone" of HN's mods and crowd is much smaller and more specific, while the attention on misbehaviour is much sharper, so the lever are not as easy to pull as on other platforms. HN is basically hard-mode, compared to any big noisy platform.

> Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately.

That's only true if it's done poorly, or outside HNs core-topics. There is a good deal of sneaky marketing on HN, but usually well integrated into the normal flow of comments, so It's either accepted in context, or low enough to fly under the radar. In a nutshell, this means, everything is accepted, as long as it brings value, high entertainment or satisfy curiosity, and is not just selling stupidly in your face.

At the end, HN is still a platform of smarter and more educated people, and they want to be handled on their level. If you can match this, you can pull every lever they've given space for. But of course, that's not something many can easily do.

> There are no "levers".

There are never "no levers" - the best you can do is make sure that the levers you know about are aligned with the purpose of the site.

And that works pretty well. Don't SEO-post, write a blog about some technical aspect of SEO-posting, and you'll do better.

HN-posting successfully can't really be done "at scale" - by design.

Here's a successful formula, but takes some time.

Participate, read things you know about and are interested in. Post comments. Eventually you'll find yourself repeating, or linking to previous comments. Write a blog post about that. Post it.

> "Here's a successful formula, but takes some time."

Have you looked at the very first sentence of the OP's submission? Their investors are not going to wait around for any of that. The OP all but outright says they want a "lever" that they can use repeatedly that pops a marketing submission to the HN front page as a gauge of interest to satisfy investors and secure funding. That isn't reliably possible even for longtime HN users with a solid posting history and high karma (and thank heavens for that or HN would be a very different place).

Exactly. My response was the polite version of "your investors are using HN as a gating factor, and the gate isn't really gameable."

And if it did become a game, it would become pretty worthless (liked LinkedIn).

I've found that there can be a lot of randomness for what makes the front page. Not too many people read the "New" page and articles drop off it pretty quickly, so it can be hard for a niche article to attract the handful of votes it needs to appear on the front page. (Though there is a "second chance" feature which helps to ameliorate this issue.) So there's a lot of randomness to what makes it onto the front page.

For instance I submitted an article three times (spaced a year apart). The first two times the article got no upvotes. The third time it got 600+ and hit the top of the front page. It's just a matter of who happens to be looking at the New page at the time.

I've found that there is a snowball effect too

If someone has less votes and its still something I find interesting, I am more critic of the whole situation to upvote

But if someone already has 400 upvotes and is on the top of the site, I will look more into it with ("woah a lot of people upvoted, lets see why" and then read the comments and some of the comments are really brilliant that it becomes the reason why I upvote the post itself too

I am sure that hackernews doesnt really recommend it but I do feel like its something that I do subconsciously that I have observed and wanted to share. It does feel like random stuff but still in a way which still makes sense for the whole ethos of hackernews.

It works because it discusses important things that are of interest to reasonably smart people. The top 5 items right now.

- Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

Ah, progress on cancer. But in mice, where lots of things work but don't transfer to humans.

- What Is an Elliptic Curve?

A core concept in modern cryptography which I don't understand. The article helped.

- Learn Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Only HN would put something like this near the top of of the forum.

- Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

This week in LLMs. Have to keep up.

- OBS Studio Gets a New Renderer

They're using Apple's Metal for talking to the GPU? How does portability work? OBS runs on Linux and Windows, too, but Metal runs only on Apple machines.

These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things.

"These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things."

I would argue Gemini is popular and commercially interesting, but yes, mainly it is a curious topic, whether one is invested in the current hype, or not.

> These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things.

This is not really your average front-page at the moment, and in fact it feels significantly more geared towards curiosity and less towards commercial interests compared with the usual. Partly because it's the holiday slow down but you see the same effect on weekends, which is telling. And IMHO hacker news is consistently more curious when America is sleeping.

HN desperately needs tags, which would serve everyone well, whether you're really here for curiosity or for all the corporate news. I'd really like to be able filter out most of the stuff for "working professionals" even if it is still legitimately technical (for example the recent docker and github news). What I usually want is all the hobby tech / PLT / open-source / science / learning-oriented stuff that's left over after that filter. I can imagine various reasons why forcing a "feed" style front-page is advantageous to some people.. but let's just say it's not about promoting curiosity.

Do you mean 'how do get a Show HN project to earn a lot of votes'?

Be somewhat novel, communicate very clearly (particularly what is' for and why you might want to use it, even if that seems obvious to you) and post around mid-morning PST so people can goof off from work to 'research' your interesting new thing.

If there were “levers” for people to pull to game the site, it would lose all its value and turn into nothing but low-effort self-promotion. I won’t claim to understand everything about HN, but I know that is not in the spirit of the site.

This post makes me feel really old.

HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.

Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as opposed to communicating to promote or to manipulate or to drive traffic or to pull any number of other “levers”) is exceedingly a thing of the past.

> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.

That's an oversimplification. There are things that get responses because they're flamebait rather than interesting, and then even more interesting things that never get any discussion going.

I don't know if the residual factor is just "chance" or if there are controllable inputs involved.

(One thing I do suspect but cannot confirm is that article title has a large effect. Interesting stuff with bad title gets overlooked, and vice versa.)

This is true. There are a few stock topics that will consistently get the fanboys out (Postgres, Ruby, Rust, SQLite) which is, IMO, usually just uninteresting fodder. And then interesting stuff which requires some intellectual engagement very often rots.

HN does have a much higher ratio of gems to dirt than any other place though, so I'm still here for the forseeable future :)

The fact that HN does not work in exactly the same way as the horrid platforms out there that automagically surface things that make neurone in your head scream "click that thing! click it! look! LOOOOOOK!", does not mean your brain doesn't treat it the same way.

This isn't unique to this technology: books with interesting titles and covers sell better than books with boring titles and covers, even if the latter has more interesting content.

I think what makes HN a little different is that a lot of places we might congregate online only exist for the flamebait, or are specifically built around engagement metrics to serve DAU/MAU numbers and advertising asks. You just happen to take a bit more chance on here than you would anywhere else, and that's absolutely 100% a good thing.

If there are controllable inputs that skew you to one side of the variance, I hope the moment someone discovers them, they are shut down - otherwise this place just becomes another hell-hole.

> If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.

A simple way to refute this is to note that some links were posted multiple times and only got traction on the second or third time.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Whether it's a feature or a bug, it's mysterious. Hence the question.

I have the impression that there's a dashboard that the admins use for "second chance" to allow them to schedule stories they think didn't do as well as expected, to give those stories a second (third?) bite at the cherry.

One sometimes sees suggestions from @dang to resubmit, and/or comments about giving stories another go around if they did worse than expected.

The only other manual intervention at that level I've heard of is to promote Ycombinator companies; but I'm not sure what complexion that takes.

There's possibly some manual actions around vouchs/flags, to revive comments that got flagged and have now been vouched for. Maybe it's all automated but I suspect there's judgement applied there; just based on how the site is run in general.

No particular insight, just been around here for ~15 years (eek!).

like many things in life, timing is an important variable.

Couldn't agree with you more. The internet has, to borrow the word of the moment, become enshittified, and people think that's "normal".

People accept that platforms should be centralised, and that they should harvest your data in order to sell it to adtech companies who will then feed it to an industry that learns in real-time how to prey on your darkest fears to sell you things you don't need but might make you feel slightly less sad for a second. And people just accept it: that's normal these days.

They even call it doom-scrolling, and don't ask "wait, should I want to scroll through actual doom? Is the occasional video that makes me smile really worth it all?"

Perhaps it's my age, but I can't understand anybody who says their main form of media consumption is YouTube. How? How do you actually put up with that, knowing what is behind every mouse movement and click, and the knowledge that every single pixel in front of you is being tweaked by robotic neuroscientists squeezing every drop out of A/B tests to make you feel like utter crap? Like, seriously, WTAF?

HN is popular within its niche precisely because it isn't like that. It is not "a platform", in the modern and now normalised sense. It links out to other sites and asks people to come back together to discuss what they saw there. Old school. No ad tracking. No doom scrolling. Pick what you like. Click it, don't click it. Discuss it, don't discuss it. Nobody is tracking "engagement". There's some gamification, but does anyone _really_ care?

This type of interaction is entirely native to my generation and older (I just squeak into millennial, on the older side), but feels completely bonkers to people who think Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are what is normal and how the Internet works.

Some of know they're not normal. We know they're aberrations, ghouls that prey on unwitting masses.

YouTube is easily the best “social network” in terms of having high-quality content with minimal manipulation. And I definitely consider it my main form of media consumption.

You just have to curate your feed and add stuff to playlists, not watch whatever is on the logged-out default home page.

What? You have to do a lot of curation and fighting the service itself (hiding shorts) to get to a bearable level. And I did not spend hours clicking things I don't like. I mostly just watch movies/clips I want, but my recommendations are full of clickbait manipulative garbage. So yes, one can find jewels in it - but only if digging through the garbage first.

I watch a ton of great content by people that I subscribe to. It's not difficult or complicated to get there.

Not sure what else to say.

But you don't agree it took a lot of effort to hide the garbage?

Not really, if anything, there is too much stuff I want to watch that is suggested to me.

I suppose if you created an account today you'd be fed a lot of garbage, but I've been watching YouTube often for at least a couple years.

Is watching videos considered a social activity now? The word "social" truly seems to have been tortured to death.

A good portion of it is just pure chance. There are relatively few people patrolling new submissions, and if something doesn't get a couple of upvotes in the first hour or so, it just disappears down the memory hole. So, you'll sometimes lose even if your content is good.

Another part of the equation is topic and tone. There's no sophisticated algorithm, but it's an eclectic forum, so if your post sounds like pure marketing or self-promo, it will probably not make it far. You need to offer something of value to readers, not to you.

An interesting quirk of the system is that people who upvote or comment on stories don't necessarily read them. A lot of HN discussion boils down to people reacting to the prompt in the subject line. There are publications that learned how to game this. I don't think it's a template worth following, but it sells...

Shameless plug: I wrote this as I tried to understand HN: https://hsu.cy/2025/09/how-to-read-hn/ (Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45331030 ) I know it only scratches the surface, but hopefully it can provide some basics.

I've found this list of "undocumented rules" to be useful https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Ok. So you'd like to promote: https://www.legitcontrol.com/ (at least you'll get your link in one comment here, no need to thank me ;-))

A system that somehow allows you to tame AI agents' unruly use of git (is that it?)

I see you did use Show HN, and that didn't work.

What you could have done is email hn@ycombinator.com telling them that your Show HN is not being upvoted. This happens, and usually dang and others mod will take a look and if you're within the guidelines will give it a small boost so it shows up in the main Show HN page. Then you're on your own.

Make sure your catchphrase, or hook is well written, cause most people here will not read past "Make Agents a Safe Collaborator in your App".

Anyways, as others said here. There are no ways to "game" HN. the closest you will manage is what you just did, basically asking for help...

That's the key, ask for help, and people will respond. People are nice, and they are willing to procrastinate their intellect away for free.

The forum tries to not be gameable. If it’s in its ideal state then it works when you have something that is legitimately interesting to the community, although it’s up to the interpreter to decide how well that works.

The only really opaque thing I’ve found is the anti spam/anti flame war rules but it’s not crazy to keep those secret and I say that as someone who gets temp banned by those rules on here frequently

edit: oh, you should also go to your profile and set showdead to `yes` if you want to see the unfiltered forum. You'll get about 10% controversial opinions and 90% green name accounts posting spam.

Ah and if the poster's name is green in your browser it means they are a very new account

If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

HN is not a nail. Stop trying to hit it.

What I know: the karma system is broken, because it is very hard to provide a controversial opinion/fact without being mass de-karma-ed.

For instance, there is serious hate here about web interop with classic noscript/basic (x)html browsers (namely basic HTML forms with at best <video> <audio> elements, optional simple CSS, often a document which is a "semantic" 2D html table with proper ids for navigation, encrypted URL parameters are your friends).

And AIs...

Investors talk about HN like it’s a growth lever, but the site mostly behaves like a long-running reading habit with spam defenses. A tiny slice of users on /new decide whether you even get a shot, gravity slowly pushes old stuff down, there’s a “second chance” queue for posts that looked promising but died early, and moderators occasionally hand-tune obvious mistakes. Beyond that, it’s just a bunch of curious people clicking what looks interesting.

The only repeatable “strategy” I’ve seen work is: write things that would be interesting even if HN didn’t exist, and let other people submit them. Trying to treat HN as a distribution channel (carefully timed posts, optimized titles, orchestrated upvotes) reliably backfires because the software + mods are explicitly optimized against that. If you treat it as a weird little newspaper run by nerds for their own curiosity, the dynamics suddenly make a lot more sense.

>If you treat it as a weird little newspaper run by nerds for their own curiosity

That's my favorite phrase of this entire thread, which I'm reading in its entirety.

I once published an opinion piece about how I thought Object Oriented Programming has problems and is overrated. I got 0 comments. Than I changed the title to the clickbaity "OOP is dead", floods of comments.

Have you considered that what you could hear from others, some of those people can be not smart? I know that’s not the reply you seek. But still an input. Sometimes, I think overanalysing something stupid makes quite little sense.

Answering the question directly, I think I understand how news.ycombinator works. It is affiliated with the parent domain, and hence it serves their agenda. As simple as that. It’s not some non-profit entity that owes you something. While I have issues with things like censoring, I understand they owe me nothing. Basically, they _allow_ me to be part of the community, if I behave.

It is not clear what exactly you are looking for?

> “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”

From my experience, both HN and Reddit have the worst traffic. I got "tens of thousands" of visitors from both with exactly zero conversion. I am now getting a few hundreds a month from Google and other sources and the conversion rate is roughly 20-25%. So pretty much not worth it to pursue HN/Reddit for your startup though your mileage would probably vary.

I'd use HackerNews for what it is, a news site for casual/mixed information with sometimes interesting discussions. You could have much better levers in other places.

To echo what dang said in the thread. It's a place to hang out and learn about new things. Or sometimes old things. It's news, it's history. All with a tech skew. I've had this account since 2008. In that time I've used it in many different ways, including getting stuff onto the front page. Honestly trying to game it doesn't work. Post something people genuinely find interesting and it will make it to the front page and in the case it doesn't sometimes the mod will see that and think it should get another shot.

HN is great for that stuff. Though I genuinely lack a good site with just developers news. HN is not that. I was using Code Project for that but it gone bankrupt. Other dev news sites seems to be closer to facebook with AI generated articles than to actual interesting development stuff.

Yea its a mixed bag. I think some people like https://lobste.rs and there's always https://dev.to. But if that doesn't work there's also infinite sub-reddits on Reddit or classically tailoring your own RSS feed using Feedly or similar. I got to that place where I've curated my source of news but it's by category; Crypto, Dev, Finance, Islam, Politics, Tech, UK, World. I've got a feed for each and it's all grouped in a single UI like this https://mu.xyz/home

Please don't try to game the algorithm here.

Or do, so that weaknesses can be identified and fixed.

The trick to gaming the algorithm here is to post interesting original content that software-focused people like to read

Don't tell the mods!

Broadly true, but I think we can let the hardware-focused people in now and again, even if they do make an awful noise as they drag their knuckles along the floor :)

Sounds like analysis paralysis. Read posts here, pay attention to what this audience expects, and then post your work. If you really want to find a source on this topic Michael Lynch (mtlynch) wrote a book called Hit the Front Page of Hacker News and you can find it if you search for it (I haven't actually read it), but I think spending an hour a week reading HN and asking yourself why a piece of writing did or didn't work for this audience would be more worthwhile.

https://hitthefrontpage.com/

This is what the whole internet was like from 1995 - 2005.

HN works like this. you can post something and if people have something to say they can comment. if you make the title accurate its more appreciated than making it cool. if people like what you did it will 'take off'. i dont think there's much other than that which i think makes it appealing.

there might be people that try to get more out of it somehow, but i dont think it 'works like that'

For me HN still maintains the impact it had when I visited it by chance in the middle of 2018:

- how wonderful and productive threads! All of them

- how simple, light and ad free UI

- where are forums of similar quality about other subjects? (never found any)

- how tf I hadn't stepped on it before, while I was losing years in places like Facebook, reddit etc?

Through participating at HN I learned to be thoughtful, humble and most importantly I feel a member of HNers!

generally politics, and religion, are topics not amenable to prolonged discussion, and slide into hostile disagreement.

use prefixes [Tell HN: Ask HN: Show HN:] and suffixes [ [PDF] [video] [1995] ] where needed.

be a human being, dont repost, or post promotional materials for adspace, cultivate a nuts and guts discussion for any project you promote rather than a sales ad.

Theres a whole cottage industry of marketing folks that work on gaming HN. Its a system like any other.

Yes. HN was created as "Startup News" by a Silicon Valley startup incubator and plenty of people here make gaming visibility a central part of their strategy for promoting their startup or promoting themselves as thought leaders to YC. I think the young'uns call it "aura farming."

A lot of the rest are people who work in SV or are startup entrepreneurs who want HN to be nothing more than a tech news and startup forum. These are the people who downvote anything they consider "nontechnical."

HN has a lot of good content and discussion, but it would be naive to pretend there aren't business interests at play on HN, and that everyone here is operating in good faith. Even though the guidelines require it.

The algorithm was shared in the past. The scoring is pretty simple tbh

- the older it is, the less score

- the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score

- penalties reduce the score ( eg. By moderator)

How it works for the end-user:

- People browsing in newest, make it visible in the main page.

- Most people see the main page

Result: interesting topics go to the main page

Additionally: Time of day and day of week seem to matter.

That's more about the competition and people online. Not about the scoring mechanism

> the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score

Unless this has changed, I don't think comments contribute positively to the score. Apparently they (used to?) contribute negatively if there are more comments than upvotes and the number of comments exceeds some threshold. See e.g. this very old article: https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall...

> In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this.

Yeah, you're correct

One of the real levers is that if you get randomly and inexplicably locked out of your Google account and your whole life/business is destroyed, posting on Hacker News might be your only chance at redemption.

The forum is a harsh mistress

https://imgur.com/a/kB7MeDz

What I find strange is that life feels oddly opaque. I’ve never met anyone who can clearly explain how it works in practice. Not just the rules, but the dynamics: what’s repeatable, what’s luck, and what actually matters.

I literally just found out about this website today. I am also having a hard time comprehending what is actually going on here. Like how do you post an ask vs show?

"Show HN: Title_of_Post" with a URL to the site to post a Show HN article. Should be "something you've made that other people can play with."

"Ask HN: Title_of_Post" with a question written in the "text" section to post a Ask HN article. Should be a text based question for the community (much like this article currently being commented on).

Link to FAQs, Hacker News FAQ[1], Hacker News Guidelines [2], ShowHN Guidelines [3], Y Combinator FAQ / Legal Terms of Use [4], Y Combinator About [5]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

[4] https://www.ycombinator.com/faq

[5] https://www.ycombinator.com/about

Guidelines, FAQ, and Legal are available as links at the bottom of the website.

One feature that's not included in the lists some people have made that I find helpful occasionally is the "by: username" in the Search feature which will find comments and submissions (filterable by Ask, Show, Launch, Job, Poll) by a specific author. These can also be found with quick links using "/threads?id=username" (comments) or "/submitted?id=username" (submissions). Such, as your personal, and obvious relatively limited contributions are:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jeffclax

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jeffclax

Key ingredients of a successful HN story are effort, passion, and curiosity.

Without effort, anyone can do it. Without passion, it's just work. Without curiosity, it's not hacking.

New Job discipline born: "Hacker News Visibility Consultant Services", like there are companys optimizing your position in the app stores :-D

[Laughs nervously]

I bet that this isn’t an exaggeration. Being highly-ranked on HN can probably give a startup a huge advantage, in the hype department.

I guarantee that LLMs are currently being feverishly trained on HN front pages, for the last few years, and we’re gonna be seeing “link farm” sites, specifically designed to rank high on HN.

I enjoy it here. I don’t hang out on any other social media, so this place gets a lot of my time (I’m writing this right now, as I’m working up some tired, to go back to sleep). I’ve spent my entire life, hanging around people that intimidate and inspire me, so this place feels like home.

If it turns into a Dead Internet site, I’ll probably pack it in. I have left a number of sites, over the years. It would make me sad, as I’ve lasted longer here, than anywhere else.

Most of my karma is from comments, not submissions. I like to engage.

There's a bunch of LLMs. Not actually that difficult to find.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

There's even some pretty obviously shady ones doing stuff like purposefully evading LLM detection systems.

It also does not take that much of a search online to find people trying to buy upvotes, comments, accounts. A lot get banned, yet people are still obviously trying.

Generally agree with you. Lot of sites over the years that have eventually been turned into wastelands. Predictabot LLM SEO spew that eventually rendered interacting there meaningless. The auto-comment, auto-review stuff has been around longer than the LLM idea, it just wasn't quite so accessible. Now its like every teenager has been handed bioweapons.

Unfortunately, (opinion) most of the mainline World Wide Web has been reduced to content that's difficult to parse from Stock Market summary bots, and most of the old vibrant forums have slowly been obliterated, so there's not that many places to go to.

Huge portion of the World Wide Web that just goes from site to site ruining the experience until there's nothing left, and no reason to participate, or even glance. Their calculations wasted turning each "platform" into a pile of vomit no-one wants to interact with.

>I’ve spent my entire life, hanging around people that intimidate and inspire me, so this place feels like home

Best sentence of the day

You post the thing.

The HN audience upvotes it or downvotes it or flags it or ignores it.

From the reaction, you get an impression of the reception of the thing.

That's... it.

Do you want to know a secret?

Sometimes my friends post on social media platform A "Hey, I've just posted on platform B. Upvotes appreciated."

Or a newsletter will say "please share this post on…"

Or people on Discord / Slack / Matrix will say "people are being mean to me on platform C, where are my defenders at?"

HN feels organic - and is pretty well moderated - but it isn't immune to family & friends giving something an initial boost.

But if no one wants to discuss it, the post will falter.

As for the other levers, it is hard to say. Sometimes the posts I've worked hardest on with the most detail just die a death. But the half-finished thought casually tossed off will Do Numbers. Outrage sometimes works, but it is a fickle friend to tame. Catchy titles aren't clickbait (despite what some people say) but they work best when they are descriptive.

And, finally, people can and do resubmit stuff. What doesn't work at 0900 Monday will be popular at 1700 Tuesday. Why? That's just the way it is.

In the end, it is all luck. But, as the saying goes, the harder you work the luckier you get.

The opposite thing is true in my experience. We write a post and immediately warn our friends not to upvote it, because none of us know how the ring detector works, but we're pretty sure it's hair-trigger. I don't think stories get to the top of HN by being voted up by friends.

Is this some kind of a "Reflexive Control" Psyop ?

How much is it worth for you to know ? ;-)

The round table has no levers

HN is a forum, what is there to understand?

Hackernews SEO agency when?

I think I can safely say that nobody understands ~~quantum~~ hacker news

The answer is in the name. The word 'hacker' used to more refer to someone who is a tinkerer, diy engineer, curious about how systems, components, etc work. Hacker News is still somewhat true to this ethos, what's popular here aligns with this old-school curiosity mindset. Of course the exact interests of the userbase has changed over the years, but if you spend a lot of time on this forum you eventually understand some of the common themes that get the minds of the hackers turning.

Unfortunately due to the enshittification of things people are conditioned to see HN as something to be gamed and leveraged for personal gain now, but in general it's algorithm-less enough, the the mods are strict enough, (thank god) that the type of content here stays pointed towards the original 'hacker' ideals.

It’s just a a forum

Are you talking about this website or Ycombinator?

Years ago I wrote [0] about the lessons I learned by reaching the front page of both HN and Product Hunt and honestly, all these years later, the only thing I can confidently say is that I don't know shit. Sometimes people posts here things I wrote and for one reason or another they gain traction.

I personally have no clue why and I kinda like it. Like probably many others I come here to find interesting content and have interesting conversation because there are a lot of genuinely interesting people on this site.

But if you're trying to minmaxing your presence on HN, well good luck.

[0] : https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/what-i-learned-by-being-1...

For years I thought that Hacker News has no moderators. Apparently it does, but they seem to keep a low profile. I have no idea what their protocol is and I don't see any help menu that mentions them.

I found out, the other day, that if you post too many comments in too short a time (also undocumented) your final comment is deleted (sorry, you just lose it) instantly with a somewhat snarky message about how you post too much.

I am a little mystified about what community Hacker News serves. It doesn't seem to be the kind of hackers I grew up with (fiercely skeptical, a la 2600 magazine), because, as one example, skepticism about AI or self-driving vehicles is generally downvoted.

Not so much Hacker News as Next Shiny Toy News.

Even so, I know of no better way to discover interesting tools and trends than Hacker News.

I think it is quite simple. Hacker News. News for hackers. Not in the "hacking" Hollywood sense of computer crimes (although there's some of that, too), but in the sense of intellectual curiosity.

Probably more than 70% of your post's impact will come from a catchy headline. People will be curious about your headline, and click through. And then, upvote if they find it interesting.

If the post is interesting but the headline isn't, then, well, bad luck.

Once a post gathers enough momentum, it goes to the front page. Then, there are a thousand bots on Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc, that repost articles that got to the front page, and it gathers even more momentum from a large portion of technologists that don't have an HN account but follow these bots.

I'm new to HN so I am just taking a guess based on what i've observed so far.

HN works by posting things you are genuinely interested in and that the other people here are genuinely interested in.

You have to be honest, people arent interested in your chatgpt wrapper or whatever flavour of the month tech is being pushed. There is more interest in someone showing off an pi project they spent a few weeks working on than someone showing a fully working ready to ship product.

So show us the product in a real and interesting way. If you are working on an app dont just post a link to the web page with some SEO slop written, write a blog where you talk about how you solved a specific technical problem.

You're going on my block list, son.

I've had mixed feelings about HN in terms of how people perceive a product over the last few years. I used to have an overwhelmingly positive opinions about the community up until COVID: everyone started making the "solution that will help researchers find a cure", which, in all instances, ended up being tons of people independently loading up papers into elasticsearch. And when I pointed out that they are all solving a problem no one has, I got jumped by a ton of people going "nooooo you just don't understand how powerful what these systems are". At the end, none of those turned out to be the silver bullet, or a bullet for that matter.

Recently it's the AI craze: you have a complex problem to solve: "AI can easily do that". You have infrastructure issues: "AI can easily do that". You have issues processing petabytes of data fast and efficiently: "AI can easily solve that". I am getting a ton of bots trying to access my home network: "AI can easily solve that". I am having a hard time falling asleep: "AI". I have a flu: "AI".

In a nutshell, the shiny new toy syndrome is very common so the reception of a product is not a guarantee for success. To give you an example: recently some people(pretty active on here) got in touch with me with regards to an initiative I am a part of: they claimed that they wanted some expertise on the subject I agreed to schedule a call. It turned out to be a sales pitch for yet another product which tries to solve a problem but it does not because the people who built it fundamentally do not understand the problem. Forget the fact that I am not interested in being their client, given that it's a volunteer project and none of the people involved are paid to do it(if anything, we are paying from our own pockets to keep it alive), it was yet another techbro product which tries to build a skyscraper starting from the roof. Except the ground underneath is partially lava, partially a swamp.

I think it is all related to the impostor syndrome: young people have it, they get a bit older and gain confidence. By the time people hit their early to mid 30s, they start realizing that most of the world operates on patches over patches and 2 layers down, no one has a clue what is going on.

I think the big part of why HN is so cool and hard to game is that real people are behind it that show up every day to make it work. Not robots (literally and metaphorically).

No corporate bullshit, no scaling strategies, no ai gimmicks and algorithms to raise revenue, just good old “make something people want”.

I assume your frustration is by design. It’s not a marketing channel.

I made a Show HN once, for my project. It provided a lot of eyes, users, and useful comments. But as it often happens, the first time I posted it it got lost into the cacophony and no one cared. I reached out to the mods, asked if I could qualify for the second chance pool [1] and my project had, finally, a chance in the spotlight.

Hacker News is too large. There's too many people and honestly not many hackers. The voting system is silly. What rises to the top is the common denominator, not what is truly interesting to any niche.

Another thing to know: a post with too many comments vs upvotes will be sent to the shadow realm. This is claimed to help deal with hot-button topics, but I've seen many interesting post that suffer the same fate because people have a lot of interesting things to share. I've seen it happen on a post about Forth of all things, with the greybeards coming to chime about something few care about, and it got hidden pretty quickly. Given the numbers, this will be the fate of your post as well.

Only dang knows how this place works. You can get an inkling of its working by being here a while and piecing it together from his comments.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

>Only dang knows how this place works

Best comment of this whole thread

Yeah bro. If you go to YC and do well enough they'll tell you. They'll put you in the second chance pool. They'll tell you not to upvote from the profile page, or from a direct link to the YC story page.

But the reason they won't tell you is that the entire reason it works is because you don't know.

Things HN likes (in my experience):

- Reverse Engineering (legacy code analysis, hardware teardowns)

- Bug Post-Mortems

- Systems Internals (database engines, kernel scheduling, compiler edge cases)

- Retro-Computing

- Infrastructure History

- Obscure Museums / Web Archives

- Convivial Tools (right to repair, privacy first)

- Intellectual Curiosities: (biological quirks, niche economies)

- Neologisms (enshittification, context engineering)

When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”

Unless you're building a start up where the potential customers are specifically HN and Reddit readers, get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots.

As lovely and wonderful as the readers of HN and Reddit are, being loved on HN or Reddit means essentially nothing. People here are the magpies of the internet - we love seeing the new shiny thing but that does not tell you it will be a success with the people who might want to buy it. For every Dropbox posted here there are hundreds of Show HN posts that didn't really go anywhere despite having tons of very positive commentary.

If you want to show investors that your start up's product has potential post about it where your customers go and get feedback from people who might give you their money. If you really want to prove your start up has potential, sell to those people and actually get their money. If you can get a sale based on your prototype/proof-of-concept/MVP product that is worth more than a million "Yeah, looks ace, I'd buy that if it was <price that's far too low>." posts from us.

I love HN. And the Show HN graveyard is huge! Many a time I’ve searched, found a post I thought sounded cool, and it’s dead… sometimes in just a couple of months.

This is a hard truth. I looked at my own Show HN post history, some are definitely in the graveyard.

If I remember correctly, when Dropbox announced its launch most replies here were “but I can self host rsync!!” Well, turned out most people can’t.

The magpies of the internet sounds like a really cool name for what its worth, dont mind if I steal it :)

I played inscryption (a really good game) and magpie had the sigil of being able to take any card from the deck and oh my, it was a beauty seeing a magpie or the sigil because that meant that I could then get any overpowered card I had from the deck.

I am sure people might not understand it if they haven't played the game but everytime I hear magpie, Its almost obligatory for me to mention inscryption. (also the same goes for stoat and ouroborous too)

Of course, the Dropbox post has a meme-level example of an HNer predicting its popularity :) [0]

That said, it also often happen that you share something and it is not picked up, even though after 10 years I think I can predict what HN loves. Sometimes a repost after 2 days will hit the front page, certainly not always.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

> get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots.

Surely idiot investors are the easiest to get money from?

Even idiot investors eventually want their money back. And they will ruin you in the process with their idiotic ideas.

Ideally you'll be working with the investors and leveraging their expertise and connections. If you're choosing an investor that you'll be working with for years, it's worth looking for things in addition to money.

You don't want to be beholden to an idiot, or at least I don't

Also, people here are probably too technically inclined to understand what normal people want. If you look at the $500/mo side projects thread, there's a bunch of projects where HN would probably say: 'but anyone can do that themselves using X'.

Like the person creating coloring pages from images using Stable Diffusion. Many HN users would just do it themselves, but many parents have no idea how to do that.

Makes me wonder how many potentially successful businesses never get built, because too many people are trying to build the next big YC project with AI or whatever tech is hype today.

> Many HN users would just do it themselves

More likes “claim” to do it themselves. Commenting on the Internet is easy. Making effort is not.

> Makes me wonder how many potentially successful businesses never get built, because too many people are trying to build the next big YC project

The can do it yourself crowd will still claim anything can be done themselves no matter big or small.

If you can write a blog post like https://ciechanow.ski/ you will get upvotes.

Good luck, looking forward...

It’s disappointing that a normal democratic forum run is alien to folks. Of course, there are moderators as we cannot expect everyone to behave :)

A significant aspect of HackerNews is driven by its liberal bend. Don’t say anything that might offend their sensitivities, and you may not be shadow banned. Please don’t say “Trump,” or they will get triggered.

Bad: "I wrote a web app"

Good: "Why I used Postgres to write a web app"

Writers.

Money. A spot as US citizen to get into startup school.

Money. An investment from a noble mind to another noble mind.

Money. Pass information to fellows at YC (who are from a different domain, see YC as a cool place) they crowd and promote (seems organic)

Money. Well, then the product or the tech fades, because its a bloatware.

They retry the same thing again with next batch of people. Keeps the forum running. The maintainers get retired or really tired.

Readers. I have seen this one before. Reader. Well, now, you are old

This question seems very strange, because it’s really not difficult to understand how it works. You submit, people vote if they like it, but mostly ignore it, and occasionally flag it. Stories that generated interests rise, sometimes to the point where they end up in the front page. Stories that generate too much unwanted interest (e.g. that look too much like flame wars, or like never-ending discussions that go nowhere) sink to the bottom. There are corner cases and you won’t get the exact algorithm, partly because human moderators intervene as well.

If there is one thing to note, it’s that obvious self-promotion is not good. Technical details are more interesting than sales pitches.

It‘s clearly manipulated/curated, you can tell my some absolutely shitty content with zero comments and zero engagement ending up and staying on the frontpage for quite a while.

I've been here for a while and that's not a pattern that I recognize, could you point out a few examples? I am fairly sure the mods would love to hear about this as well.

It doesn't look like shit content, but:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46310650

posted an hour ago with 4 measly upvotes among other threads with hundreds of upvotes on spot 10?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311092

4 upvotes in 26 comments, also on spot 10 after refresh?

Still zero comments for both! If all you need to end up in the top 10 is 4 upvotes within 30 minutes I could start selling hacker news front page placements right here, right now.

Is the value of an upvote karma based? Is the ranking view based? Are view by high karma accounts worth more? In any case, those two posts are pretty sketchy. No one cares enough to comment on them and they are still on the frontpage.

It’s always amusing to see a topic that’s so esoteric no one can toss off low effort drive by comment on it. Let alone have insightful input on the subject.

I’d believe it’s the mods juicing it by hand, but perhaps there’s an algorithm filtering for subject distance from the core hn oeuvre?

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