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Comment by antoko | Hacker News Reader

TLDR oversimplifying article is overly simple and gets things wrong and doesn't consider others.

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.

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Thanks for the correction about downvotes. Fixed.

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.

I disagree, if you're wanting something to "go viral" or whatever 100 upvotes at a busy time, when there are 30 other submissions with over 100 in a similar timeframe is not nearly as useful as 100 upvotes on say Saturday morning when there are less submissions and less voting activity.

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.

Voting activity is proxy for reading activity. I don't have evidences that Saturday posting has more exposure than weekday posts given nearly the same upvote performance.

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).

> submissions don't have downvotes

That's only because you don't have enough karma.

Nope. I have >29,000 karma and I can't downvote submissions (only comments). There is a "flag" feature but that's not the opposite of an upvote.

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