Ask HN: what makes some show HNs really work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: what makes some show HNs really work?

34 pointskinj2819 comments

So, I had tried to submit a "Show HN" a couple of times, and it never worked.

A week later, someone else submitted the link to my project and it made the front page of HN.

Thus, I suspect there is a great deal of variance/chance involved.

I agree there is a certain amount of chance involved. But, I have made the front page a few times and the time someone else submitted my work had the best upvotes/traffic/comments. There are some good reasons for that. Someone else thinking your stuff is cool enough to submit gives it a vote of confidence that you promoting it yourself does not.

Of course, for the most part, my stuff still makes it here due to my own submissions. I have been told for years to "self promote" and been seriously, horrendously attacked and crapped on for trying to do exactly that. I appear to be getting less bad at it but..yeah, it generally is better if someone else is promoting your stuff. There are sound social psychology reasons for that being a stronger position.

Meh, the content is the same. The same content should be consistently ranked.

Granted someone else posting the link is a good signal, but that reflects more the prior probability rather than the outcome.

I had a successful "Show HN" a year and a half ago: 482 upvotes, lots of positive comments about my site. It even (tangentially) led to some business partnerships.

Here's what I think made it work:

* Above all, a good product that's worth talking about and learning from.

* A clear, unambiguous title. Don't piss people off with linkbait.

* Luck/timing. I posted it around noon Chicago time, which feels like a good time of day to post, considering major time zones represented by this community. And there wasn't any big tech news at the time, IIRC.

* Participation in the comments. One of the great things about Show HNs is the opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback to the poster(s). If you (as the poster) participate in discussion, it makes the whole experience better for everybody.

(Here's the Show HN link in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4790636)

Also, it doesn't hurt to be co-creator of Django ;)

I think the timing and wording is important. Someone here did an analysis about the most optimal time for submissions. I don't have the link right now, but from what I recall it was during week days and starting around 1:30 PM GMT and lasting a couple of hours.

This link, I presume: http://silverman.svbtle.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker-...

Yeah, that's the one. :) According to that post, the optimal time is 9 AM to 10 AM EST (or 2 PM to 3 PM GMT).

i agree, timing makes sense. I tried to do a show HN on a saturday night in US time. & i got no response. though i think my title wasnt that bad. Perhaps you can give me your comment on the title. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861469

In general, I have noticed that posts that get upvoted have good content and the title has at least one word in it that people recognize such as HTML5, SQL, Go, etc. However if the title is full of buzzwords, it is probably linkbait and not cool. As others have said, timing is important too. I once posted an article and it was off the "new" page in ~10 minutes because I just happened to post when a bunch of other people did.

> However if the title is full of buzzwords, it is probably linkbait and not cool.

Aww, really? I was tempted to write an article about building a single page application with server side rendering using postgres, express, react and nodejs only so I could submit the article to HN as "Building a SPA with SSR using the PERN stack".

do you suggest this title of my show HN doesnt resonate with people? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861469

I am not an expert so I don't really know. Please take my opinion with a grain of salt.

I personally don't find it engaging because I don't have any sense what it means. Sharing HN articles is not something you usually do with a team nor is it a problem I personally need solved. So I would probably skip looking at it because it didn't grab my attention. Your website seems to be a bit like Reddit so maybe using an analogy to it would help your post stand out. Reddit might not be the best analogy, but the idea is to use an analogy that is understandable and recognizable.

It s a mystery really. I submitted 2 almost identical websites recently, the first got 0 votes, the second made it to the frontpage.

Luck.

If you're asking this question, I assume you're trying to advertize a product, a boring product.

Your submission title (and webpage) have to immediately answer the question "Why does this matter/is interesting enough to even bother clicking the link?"

Assuming that the product is boring seems like an unreasonable assumption. I see lots of very interesting Show HNs that never hit the front page. I'm pretty sure a big part of it is timing and luck.

I would think it's mostly timing.

It would be interesting to see success rates of different categories of links based on time submitted.

well - i posted this question at a very odd hour compared to what others are suggesting on this thread. this seems to be doing far better than my show hn.

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