What if successful posts on HackerNews are just luck? | Hacker News Reader

What if successful posts on HackerNews are just luck?

blog.ploki.info

45 pointsacemtp23 comments

Everything is luck, and everything isn't luck. I make the comparison talking about my app business. Making a great app is like buying a lottery ticket that happens to have an expected outcome of greater than 0. The better you make the app, the more likely it is to succeed. If it's a great app, it will make some money, but to have a hit you also have to have a lot of luck. You pretty much can't have a hit though without making it good.

It's the same with a post on HN. You have to actually have good content, but that is not enough to guarantee the front page. You have to have good content, and you have to get lucky. I've had stuff get near the top of the front page and get > 15k views and I've had similar content fall off the new page with just a few views and no votes. As with the apps though, you can't have hit if it's crap. You have to be good and lucky.

The word "luck" suggests a chaotic nature to the outcomes; the initial conditions being the time of day of the post, the first few up/down votes, what people are online and browsing at the moment. Of course controlling for quality content, as you say.

But there might also be some intrinsic aspect to successful posts that's hard to analyze and replicate and that is entirely orthogonal to quality, such that that post would have made it to the popular page even under different initial conditions. So it's "luck" in the sense that it hits some sweet spot in the fractal plane of our imagination.

Not entirely related and this could just be coincidence, but.. I've seen a few cases lately where people have linked https://news.ycombinator.com/newest or just asked people to go there to vote their story up and the stories have fallen off the front page sharply despite doing well.

People used to claim getting people to hit /newest was the best way to encourage votes (since votes from direct linking to items were penalized or not counted in some way) but I suspect votes made from direct visits to https://news.ycombinator.com/newest are now also subject to the same fate.

"Stories have fallen off the front page sharply despite doing well" is an instance of flagging overcompensation, not punishment for vote rigging.

Also, some domains have been penalized, which is why some articles fail to make the front page even with many votes on r/newest (e.g. medium.com)

Why are some domains penalized? Just curious.

Usually domains with a high submission quantity of typically low quantity content. (imgur.com, quora.com, qz.com.) However, higher-quality domains such as github.com and arstechnica.com get penalized as an offset to the fact that duplicate submissions result in upvotes.

See the full list at: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

> However, higher-quality domains such as github.com and arstechnica.com get penalized as an offset to the fact that duplicate submissions result in upvotes.

I've never understood that. Submitting content IS upvoting content. Clearly if I'm willing to take the time to submit content I want to upvote it. I'd personally think that multiple submissions of the same thing should get a bonus, not a penalty.

That might be a problem if spambots are involved, though.

It would be interesting indeed to know if it's the case.

In all case, I prefer to have direct feedback from HN community.

Luck is useful, but not sufficient.

Luck, or a voting ring, helps a post to reach the front page. Depending upon the time of day, an article needs to get a few upvotes quickly.

Once it's on the front page, it's up to the content to make it stick.

As with startups, it's not about luck, it's about timing. The original article was posted on a Monday, which typically leads to the most amount of activity (and with the greater amount of activity, the faster the snowball effect of vitality.)

See also: a heat map analysis I had made analyzing which day-of-week and time blocks result in the greatest number of viral posts on average on Reddit: http://i.imgur.com/ct5LNcG.png

Luck and / or referencing a number of lines of javascript...

(I am sorely tempted to re-submit my old links with "in 0 lines of javascript" at the end, since I'm a python programmer :P It'd be fine if they were viewed but not upvoted, it just makes me sad when my work gets pushed off the front page by 100 "blah in pure CSS" links before a single person takes a look :( )

well, that just suggests that HN viewers heavily skew interest for javascript/CSS rather than python. Either that or its total blind luck.

Indeed, the community cares about how many lines of what language an app is written in, rather than what the app /does/ :P

Success is almost always lucky, but it's rarely only lucky.

Was luck involved in "What if successful startups are just lucky?" making it to the front page? Surely. But it was also an article that caught the interest of many prominent HN readers and posters. Luck isn't going to get you anywhere if nobody cares about what you're saying.

Is it luck when I accidentally upvote (and can't un-upvote) a HN story when simply trying to scroll down the page on iPad?

I mean, I'm not saying all my upvotes are haphazard, but there has to be a margin of 'accidental upvotes' to which the pattern could never be discerned anyway…

I can't be the only one… ¬_¬

It's a postmortem of an article who had 20,000 unique visitors and stay 20 hours on frontpage of hackernews.

Out of my 30 or so submissions, 4 reached the front page. I only wrote one of those myself though the other were just stuff i found interesting. I found the timing to be crucial, a time where its relatively early in the day in Europe and the west coast worked best.

I think you guys are overthinking this. In the grand scheme of life and the universe, is getting a 'successful post' on HackerNews really all that high up on the list of things to care about?

No one from North Korea visited your page. That must hurt.

pretty sure there is a lot of that... but there is with all success. its just downplayed because people like to think they earned things they didn't - and vice versa that failures are not their fault.

Thank you moderator... a penality... Why?

It is just luck. I'm a frequent reader and upvoter of the new section, and even considering possible auto-penalties, what gets upvoted can be just as dependent on non-content factors (which I'll conflate with "luck") as it is on actual merit.

The easiest non-controllable factor is: external exposure and canonical IDs. Some stories jump to the top not because a whole bunch of people were reading the New page, but a whole bunch of people were on Twitter/Reddit/Slashdot/NYT and then tried to be the first to submit a story...if they all used the same link, then the first submitter gets all the upvotes, and the OP benefits from that.

The second uncontrollable factor -- ostensibly -- is title. Did the OP have a great link-baity title? That'll catch the eye of New post readers. Obviously, you can take the vigilante action of writing your own title and hoping that it isn't egregious enough to get flagged before it hits the front page...but that is also "luck"

And of course, time of day and activity is important. Did your great tech blog post come at a time when Apple announced a bunch of new products, or when the NSA got caught red-handed again? Instead of 30 possible open spots on the front page, you may have been competing for 20.

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I've seen great stories not get a single second upvote, and then resubmitted the next day and get hundreds of votes...and nothing about the user or submission would suggest that the first submitter was punished. It's just luck of the draw many times. I've managed to rack up a decent amount of karma but I've never thought it was because my submissions are higher quality than anyone else's...and conversely, people who feel they don't get any traction shouldn't take it personally.

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