Best Time to Post on Hacker News: It's Irrelevant
antontarasenko.com
antontarasenko.com
What? HN's ranking algorithm is notoriously opaque and manual. Or are other websites even more so?
"How are stories ranked?
On the front page, by points divided by a power of the time since they were submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way.
Stories on the new page and comments on the comments page are listed chronologically."
Now, try to find a similar answer for the websites like Facebook or Quora.
(I don't necessarily think that the algorithm SHOULD be open, but it's clearly not currently.)
http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
So all the chart shows is that the greatest proportion of points from votes on the weekend come from submissions a few hours later than the proportion of weekday votes, which doesn't answer the question "is it better to submit on a weekday or a weekend?"
> Time-related variables explain less than 1% of variation—meaning, unsurprisingly, that the other 99% depend on something else.
Where do you get the 1% figure from? That's not shown anywhere in the code. You could calculate a R^2 from a linear regression, sure, but the data violates all the rules that make linear regression valid.
The rules are simple: a user submits a link and title, the community upvote and downvote this submission.
Yes the rules are simple (they're actually not but they can be simplified), but yet the article seems to have gotten them wrong, submissions don't have downvotes.
I starting skimming after that, it appears the metric he's using is number of upvotes, this is NOT the relevant metric, posters are looking for exposure - what they want is a position on the front page. While those things are linked they're not the same. Would also probably want to take into account pageviews on weekends vs. weekdays as this affects exposure. Maybe it correlates to votes/no. of submissions, but maybe more people passively consume on weekends or weekdays.
That's only because you don't have enough karma.
As for the metrics, being on the front page seems to drive less motivated traffic. When a user upvotes the link, he cares. When the link gets to the front page, users click it because it's on the top, not because they're interested.
Hence, sales or whatever, but one should be interested in upvotes as the indicator, not the front page.
This is why others have done analysis on the "best time to post" they're not trying to gather upvotes they're trying to be on the front page for as long as possible... actually maybe that's a bad assumption on my part, I figured this was about an eyeball funnel, perhaps people are karma gathering? if it is the latter then absolutely upvotes is the correct metric.
Personally, I think the focus should be on creating something great and let that be what drives the upvotes, if its about getting internet points, umm I've already spent too much time discussing something I don't care about.
Agreed on making something great as the end. But delivering the product to the audience is important for niche products. Then factors like time, website, text become important (when they matter).
It made sense, too. As most analyses will show, fewer articles are posted on the weekend and therefore new turnover is pretty low.
(Just pulled the numbers again. The average jumps up 4 points at 11 GMT on Saturday and stays there until 3 GMT on Monday morning)
And for science, the query:
select avg(points), std(points), weekday(created), hour(created) from stories group by weekday(created), hour(created) order by weekday(created), hour(created);'How to get on the front page of HN?' is basically the same problem as 'How to jump from the 'newest''s section front page to the HN's front page before my post gets replaced by newer posts there?'
To do so, you need to remain long enough on the 'newest''s section front page which happens when there is less 'posting competition'. So if you post around 8-9am EST (see here: [1]), your post will remains longer on the 'newest' front page which gives you more time to gather upvotes. At this time, the competition is such that it is easier to jump on the front page as there are less items posted.
However, this happens right before a lot of traffic pours into the website which ensure you can enjoy a lot of visibility/upvotes once you are on the front page.
Long enough to gather enough upvotes. The number of people upvoting matters, which changes during the day. It might change in direct proportion to the number of people submitting new posts. In that case all times would be equal.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9423401 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9425070
(sorry, I know humor is not allowed on HN. It's serious business here)