Hacker News Reader

Comment by Peroni | Hacker News Reader

Point 4: 'Hacker News'

    Get to #1 spot on HN & you'll get tons of page views.

Reminiscent of 'How to draw an Owl' - http://i.imgur.com/Z1oTC.jpg

In all seriousness, Point 7: Share Buttons - are these actually effective? It's a genuine question as I've seen such a mixed response to them. We've chosen not to include any obvious share buttons on hackerjobs.co.uk as I figured no-one would want to share a job on their facebook account so lets not ruin the minimalism of the page. Thoughts?

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We actually have an article on our blog 'Debunking the social proof myth' that presents a case study about these sharing buttons: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/social-...

Very interesting, definitely going to do more research about these buttons.

Might be a personal bias here, but I would never use those buttons to share your website/product/blog with my friends. I'd just copy and paste the URL into Facebook/Twitter/whatever and go from there.

Judging by its usage rate in previous projects I've been a part of, many other people operate the same way or simply ignore any sort of sharing aspect.

I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone. Can you reveal more about the usage rates you've seen?

I can't give you solid numbers (as it's almost been a year since I touched those projects) but they were far below 5%, typically bordering 1-2%.

That's off the top of my head, so take it with a grain of salt. :)

My experience is that share buttons are pretty useless. I included share buttons in a free app I released about 6 months ago: http://scottvallanceapps.com/app/what-animal-are-you/

I've had about 30 clicks on the links included in the twitter posts, from about 2 or 3 twitter posts. Not a bad number of clicks per posting, but the app itself still gets over a hundred downloads a week from App Store searches.

Point 4 - well in person I went over how Hacker News works etc (these are people that have never heard of Hacker News)

Share buttons - yes they're effective, I've measured the conversion rate on different sites and it's proved worthy to have them. Here's a good article about share buttons - http://socialmouths.com/blog/2012/05/08/social-media-buttons...

> these are people that have never heard of Hacker News

Then I feel that you are contributing to the dilution of the value of the site.

You could argue that if that said presentation was clearly stating to use hacker news as a marketing tool. (Which would attract the wrong people from the get go anyway).

On the flip side, bringing hacker news to the attention of the mass could have also a positive effect especially if these people can contribute relevant and good content.

Additionally I feel that HN has a good algorithm to stop most of the people who wouldn't be a good fit anyway. Posting a post on HN and then getting people to vote won't get you to the front page (and if it does, getting dropped off it is pretty easy if the content you posted is not relevant).

> Additionally I feel that HN has a good algorithm to stop most of the people who wouldn't be a good fit anyway.

> Posting a post on HN and then getting people to vote won't get you to the front page (and if it does, getting dropped off it is pretty easy if the content you posted is not relevant).

If there's too much spam, those brave netizens who patrol the windswept frontier of /newest don't get time to look at what is actually good.

They start upvoting on headlines.

> those brave netizens who patrol the windswept frontier of /newest

I don't know how they feel about it, but I sometimes feel that visiting /newest to vote / flag stuff is a kind of civic duty. For the good of all of us (except the ones who are dead).

Most of them will simply use Hacker News to find interesting content, not sure how that's diluting the site.

How are they going to get to the top of HN without posting their useless blogspam?

I believe a more appropriate question would be "How are they going to get to the top of HN posting their useless blogspam?"

Because the answer for your question is easy: Posting useful things.

And as far as I know, that's the only way to get enough upvotes to appear even on the first page.

Within the past few months, I've noticed a lot of things on the front page with 20+ points, no comments, and little value.

Judging by the comments at the bottom of this discussion, I think I see a growing trend.

Let's hope you are not right then, for our sake.

I hate this attitude, and it's prevalent all over HN. What makes you so special? Because you simply found this site before someone else?

I imagine there are plenty of brilliant and interesting people on the internet that are not aware of HN, but could contribute nicely if they became members here.

This "age elitism" issue is wearying. It happens in other places too (SomethingAwful, for example, went through a hilariously horrible period where the year you registered was the most important part of your post).

But this is supposedly an intellectual forum, not a comedy forum. Grow up and stop thinking the number of days since joining makes you better than someone else.

(Yes, I joined after you. I am also diluting this forum. Get off my lawn.)

When I first got here, people were complaining about the new guys. I only seem "old"-ish because I joined to make a comment like 3 (edit: actually 4, crikey) years ago and then didn't come back until this year.

My problem is not the new guy. It's that he says he found non-HN readers and, in so many words, said "fill up their page with stuff".

He didn't say "join HN and hang around for a while".

He said: "Get your page on the top of HN".

Those aren't the same things.

> He didn't say "join HN and hang around for a while".

> He said: "Get your page on the top of HN".

Fair enough, I see what you are saying. Sorry for the rant, it's early and the coffee is still settling in. =)

Perfectly understandable. In text I frequently convey an air of breathtaking arrogance (in person only occasionally so).

I think age is the wrong metric, you're right registering before someone doesn't mean jack.

What does mean something is intent, and telling people how to exploit HN brings in people intending to ... exploit HN!

It's a shitty trend and it's why we get so much generic-startup-story garbage from startups who've decided to make us their studio audience.

Point 4 now makes a bit more sense!

Cheers for the insight.

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