Ask HN: how do I promote on Hacker News?

6 points·DenGorbachev··6 comments

So I've made https://pintask.me/. Since it's a hackable task tracker, Hacker News is THE place to promote it. But how do I do that without pissing everybody off? :)

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You've basically done all you can do... submit it. Now wait a few months, make some improvements, and submit it again to show your improvements. Anything more often than that would be considered spam.

You could also put more information in your profile and then just participate enough that people want to click your profile to see who you are and what you do. This is probably the best long-term plan. If someone on HN wants to hire a security research firm, who do you think they are going to go to first? (If you don't know the answer, that's good evidence you need to participate more!)

Lots of products of HNers have become popular on HN because of the creator's participation. DuckDuckGo is another good example.

What about writing blog posts about cool things you can do with Pintask? Or maybe even something not related to Pintask but to coding in general?

That's a good idea, but if all you submit is your own blog, you're going to get blocked at some point by the spam protection system. HN is specifically set up to prevent non-contributors from using HN to promote their content. In other words, if you want to benefit from HN, you need to let HN benefit from you and your full participation in the community. It can't go just one way.

There are a few subreddits in which you can advertise. I reckon there's some overlap between the community here and /r/programming or whatever the subreddit of du jour.

Provide valuable content for us to read about your website.

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