Show HN: Highlighting Efforts of Creation from Hacker News
medium.com
medium.com
HN Showcase highlights the problem: Hardly any of the Show HN posts get voted on anymore. I think we've become more a community of critics than makers. I haven't even thought about posting Show HN's for my last couple of projects (and my current startup), where 5 years ago that would have been the first thing I did! A cool hack is worth sharing, even if it's not perfect.
EDIT: Actually, if you feel like me and have held back, why not use the comments section of this post to "Show HN" your project. At least in here you'll know everyone cares about side projects and maybe we can all endeavor to give you constructive feedback :)
And I think your idea is even better than what I did!
Medium is nice, but it might be overkill for this - I've just written a self post on HN for this purpose, I'll post it up around 1am PST tonight (don't want to post the same thing twice in a day).
I think it should be like the whoishiring bot, only once a week rather than once a month.
Other thoughts:
- everyone who posts there agrees to comment/give feedback on 5+ other posts
- everyone who posts something must include a backstory to their project (why did they want to build it)
If you have also tried to get feedback on your personal projects on HN without much luck and want to put some input into what this weekly post might look like, feel free to shoot me an email (cjbarber@stanford.edu)
[Also, I realize a bunch of people on HN have tried to do this. Hn for ideas, a bunch of different sites for posting your product betas, etc, not sure what the right solution is but with some collaboration we might be able to tease it out!]
Still got some more votes, but nothing could bring it up above #50.
Here's a screen of the ranking weirdness: http://hn-voting-weirdness.bitballoon.com/
Don't know what it got penalized for...
An HN pet peeve of mine is that flagging does not require even a modicum of rationale. I can flag any submission without even the slightest justification. When my own submissions have been flagged, I've also been left wondering "Why?" I understand why many of my submissions have not been upvoted. Many are simply not of upvote-quality. But not upvoting is quite different from flagging.
You may be interested in the HN Slapdown user script [1] which provides insight into articles' scores versus their rank order. With this installed, I tend to look especially at those with red scores because I am interested in counteracting what I believe to be an overzealous application of flagging.
Even right now, this very article has a yellow score indicating that it may be flagged (or something else is affecting its rank order versus its point score).
I personally have only ever flagged one or two articles, and only when I felt that the subject matter had utterly nothing to do with my understanding of the purpose of this site. When I did so, I was shocked at the magnitude of the penalty: if I recall correctly, the article I flagged was instantly dropped from the front page to the third page. It really gave me appreciation for how sparingly one should apply flags.
When I don't find a submission interesting, I just don't upvote it.
We don't have anything like a voting ring, but we obviously did tell people about launching BitBalloon in a Show HN. Seems we shouldn't have done that.
This might be a reason ShowHN posts seem to be penalized in general, I imagine it's the norm to tell your friends when you launch a whole new product...
I launched r/SideProject because there are a lot of great projects and startups that do not get any exposure. It is a subreddit for sharing and receiving constructive feedback on side projects and startups.
r/SideProject: http://www.reddit.com/r/sideproject
I submitted my javascript library last week and was bummed it didn't get upvoted more, even though it was well received on github. I've spent a horrible lot amount of time on it, https://github.com/amark/theory if anybody is interested. And my Twitter account is the same as my username here.
I would also argue most of them articles are not within HN guidelines.
Perhaps it's time to reverse that so ShowHN post get positively scored. Also maybe reduce the impact of flagging on ShowHN posts.
Also relevant: http://showinghn.com/ https://twitter.com/JustShowHN
edit: off topic, but I was wondering if anyone knew who I could ask to have the hell ban removed on my account? (other than emailing pg)
Not yet, but I believe concentrating them into one post on HN might make it easier for them to be noticed (in many ways pooling the resources of the posts/creators).
It didn't pick up much traction at the time but I know (as this submission demonstrates) that the issue is one many members of the HN community would like to see addressed.
Part of the issue lies in the fact that HN is essentially a loose collective of special interest groups. Show HN submissions are competing not only with Main stream news (as you suggest) but also the large variety of other submissions ... and visa versa.
I genuinely think that a curated summary (in whatever form it may take, whether that be directory, ezine or podcast) from a couple of interesting people with different opinions would infer so much value to the HN community. Keep posting!
I think one way to address the great idea you're bringing up is to use the code I have produced for PDL (voting algorithm and all) and create another site that's only for peoples personal projects. We can have some sort of verification process where the submissions have to be approved as a "personal project" to be on the home page. Once the item is on the home page we'll demand that it needs a certain amount of comments/likes in order for it to be removed and for the next personal project to appear.
IDK, it's just a quick idea. I look forward to seeing how this vision of yours progresses.
So how about a throwaway account, so karma issues are put aside, that posts each Friday evening a thread that anyone can attach their maker projects to - a "MadeByHN" thread?
edit: http://www.weekendupdate.me would be great to know why it is halted.
Rings pretty true to me; admittedly, I don't participate much in comments or have a recognizable name, but my past submissions certainly fit this bill.
Though, when I look at the 'newest' queue [1], there are 30 posts in the last hour and only one front page. Not everybody can make it. For my part, I'm mostly curious what does, actually, make it.
Not a huge problem, but it's annoying to the point of distracting to require so much scrolling for so little actual text. Otherwise, I love the idea and the execution.
As an aside, I think your requirement of less than 1000 twitter followers is a bit low. I have a couple thousand followers and I can tell you that it means very little. If I tweet a link to a project of mine I can expect a ctr of about .2%.