Ask HN: My HN link sank without a trace. What now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: My HN link sank without a trace. What now?

22 pointsbillpg27 comments

Earlier, having worked very hard on a very informative and important (IMO) essay, I posted it to HN, where it sank without trace. No votes. No comments.

What now?

View on HN

Get on with your life. What makes the front page depends on time of day, what's in the news, whether people had a good or bad week, and what all else. Many, in fact most, of the links I submit also sink like a stone.

Now, it's a double bummer when you write something. But it's still there on your blog to be discovered and shared later. You could also rewrite or polish it a bit. I presume it's this: http://blog.hackensplat.com/2014/07/is-your-api-broken.html which I found interesting, but a little bit inaccessible because you fired off examples all over the place but your basic thesis was sort of buried inside.

This is a problem (a small one - I want to reiterate that I liked it!), because you're talking to engineers in engineer-speak (thus driving away most business-minded readers) but what you're actually talking about is a business problem (directly exposing your transaction handler to the outside world without building for failure could result in misplaced orders = customer dissatisfaction and loss of money). You're saying that it's not enough just to make the interface - you also have to worry about external failures. IMHO the best way to do this is put the programmer in the customer's position first (since almost all coders are also consumers, this shouldn't be too hard) and then work your way back to discussing API fragility.

As for getting more views from HN, I think it's fine to mention an article you wrote in a comment if it's relevant, or even to resubmit it with or without a redraft, as you decide as long as you don't do this too often, like once in a few months.

Thanks for the feedback. When I was writing it, I was address the people who make APIs rather than those who consume them. The bit at the end ("Do I need to do this") started life as the introduction but I think I put it on the end because I needed a good way to close it.

I'll have a think about restructuring it before I try submitting it again. Thanks.

Never expect to get any upvotes for your submissions, no matter how good you think it is, and don't be offended if you get zero upvotes. There's a lot of luck involved.

Helpful links:

Analysis of all HN submissions before Feb: http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/

Analysis of Show HNs since new Show HN feature: http://minimaxir.com/2014/07/show-hn/

Which basically means don't bother ever submitting.

Ideally, you're blogging for intrinsic reasons and not "I want to get famous and be on the top of Hacker News."

I've been there, it's not that special. :P

I don't mean don't blog. I mean keep blogging but don't bother submitting to HN, because even the few seconds that it takes are wasted.

You've got to organize a voting ring. Sadly, I've seen this work quite well for mediocre submissions several times. I've seen YC companies do this.

You could similarly just make a few accounts and run them off of a few different VPSs, since it only takes a handful of votes to get you on the front page. That strikes me as unethical, but I'm sure more and more interested parties will be doing that or getting large employee bases to accomplish the same thing as HN's user base increases.

Hacker News has a voting ring detector, so this is not recommended. (it will penalize articles with a high probability of having a voting ring and eventually kill them). The Brandery article that was submitted today was likely hit by a voting ring.

That being said, there are some YC companies that do this. However, the flag mechanism far counteracts bad articles which have received unjust votes, so it's an unstable equilibrium.

If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054209, yes, it tripped the voting ring detector. We unkilled that one a while ago.

As for YC company voting rings: certainly this exists, but we penalize them too. I can't claim that we do it perfectly even-handedly—that would be claiming no unconscious bias—but we try to. That's one reason we do as much as we can programmatically, since the software has no such bias.

The principle governing HN is to have the best possible content on the front page. Anything else would be pound-foolish. Not that we do have the best possible content, but that's our goal and is what drives our thinking.

That link goes to a blank HN page.

That's because it was killed, again.

We unkilled it again.

Post it someplace else. These days I consistently get upvotes when I post things to reddit, so long as I choose a subreddit where the people have a PMA. (That is, not proggit!)

This best thing you can do to help other people escape this fate is look at the "new" page often and upvote things that look interesting to you.

There's a lot of randomness in what makes the front page. We're working on a plan to reduce that randomness.

I think this could pretty easily be solved if there was a somewhat small box on the frontpage with samples from posts from the last hour that haven't made it past /new yet. This puts the important stage of the democracy (the primaries, if you will) back in the average users' hands.

It happens, alas. It seems like the volume of submissions has been going up, new links scroll off the first page of /new faster than they used to. So it's harder to predict what will catch peoples' attention and what won't. It feels like there's a bigger element of luck to it -- of having submitted it at just the right time -- than there used to be.

All you can really do is look for other channels to get the word out -- appropriate subreddits? High-profile people on Twitter who are interested in the subject?

Note that # of submissions is directly proportional the the time submitted.

http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-submissions.png

Post it somewhere like Medium and spread the word through channels other than HN.

Heck if it is good enough, it'll be re-posted on Reddit and HN like everything else always is.

Social channels only work if you have sufficient reach on your social channels. If you have less than a couple thousand followers on both, then it's the equivalent of a tree falling in a forest.

Put "show HN" on it. After they added the special feed for that the other day, everyone was hacking that and there were about 7 on the front page for awhile.

Ironically, this post is sticking on the front page :). Maybe that says something about negativity in the nerd world. Then again, maybe not.

I do have to say, though, that only a true nerd would feel some sort of failure by not getting to the HN front page. Jesus still loves you.

"IMO" ... you didn't find any "early adopters" who were cruising the new postings and agreed with your opinion. Sorry to see that your meta-posting was deemed more important.

EDIT:

I just checked the "spurned posting" ... it's important to me (and as described in the linked article, a hard problem to solve).

> Sorry to see that your meta-posting was deemed more important.

I know what you mean, but wouldn't put it that way. Meta posts are a class of their own. They're reliably popular.

If we didn't prune them, meta posts would be all over the front page every day, along with other kinds of reliably popular post that don't fit the mandate of this site.

This post was killed by user flags.

What now?

What are you wanting to happen?

I meant "What now" as in "What should I do now?"

I've relied on HN so much these dats, I've no idea where else to go.

Then perhaps you need to take that as an indication that it is time for you to diversify your approach here? Or perhaps you need to figure out what went wrong with the post, learn from that, and do another, better post at some point.

I am still learning to write good titles and learning other things. Some of my writing does well here but a lot of it does not get any real notice. It would be nice if that were different and I am working on improving, so I hope that changes. But, for now, it is what it is.

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