I'm sure anyone that's submitted even semi-regularly has experienced getting no upvotes then seeing the same thing submitted by someone else hit the front page a few days later.
Randomness plays a large role. That's why the FAQ says a small number of reposts is ok if a story hasn't had significant attention yet (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. We want good stories to get multiple cracks at the bat.
For best results, it's important not to just post and repost your own stuff though. If you do that, our software will start interpreting your account history as promotional and will start enforcing this guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
It's best to build up a track record of interesting submissions from unrelated sources, and to intersperse your own articles with those. If you dig up interesting things from a variety of places, things people haven't run into before, then you'll be perceived as a community contributor rather than someone trying to market something. Particularly good are stories on out-of-the-way topics that rarely or never get attention. The best submissions are the ones that can't be predicted from any existing sequence (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
I often find myself on /newest when I’m spending the day trying to “complete the internet”. It tends to fall after reading the full front page, all of twitter and various news websites, but before I resort to Reddit…
True, I have posted info about my key remapper here a few times, https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto, but when I posted it it never really took off. Then some guy, nick something, posted it and the thing really took off. Timing & luck is what it really seems to come down to.
That surge of viewers also resulted in a distinct up take of stars for days, almost a full week following the event lol. Word of mouth definitely kept it getting attention, but typically I see a few new stars a day. I don't really watch it that closely now though.
I am happy to have created an app that really resonates with a lot of tech users and programmers though.
My experience at posting content at HN is somewhat hit-and-miss: sometimes stuff I post get no votes, only for the same content (posted by another person) to be upvoted and hit the front page. Ah well. :-)
Maybe it's related to the timezone I'm in (Singapore: UTC+8). When I post, most of the western hemisphere HN population is still asleep.
Side none: one time, I did get an email politely requesting that the upvotes for an item I posted be re-assigned to somebody (who posted the same content) with much lower karma. I was okay with that.
The one and I think only time I hit the front page (after a couple years of submissions) was a title that was extremely dry -- just the name of my project, without trying to say what it was (other than what is conveyed by the name). And had a 10 second elevator pitch as the intro paragraph on the page.
My conclusion is that if you can think of a click bait title, think of the complete polar opposite of click bait, and that is more likely to be looked at.
Back in 2015 I decided to bot my HN account for fun and karma. I wrote a python script called karmabum that scanned a few dozen RSS feeds every 30 seconds to catch fresh articles. When it saw a new article, it launched the Submit page with the form parameters pre-populated. At that point a TamperMonkey userscript took over and submitted the form for me.
Karmabum ran for something like 24 hours, and got me some good karma, before users started complaining and I was quickly thereafter banned. Luckily, dang is very gracious and un-banned my account after I reached out, and to this day I have never botted my HN account again.
These days I use those skills for good, writing E2E tests :)
I think you were hitting some kind of limit regarding submits per day. I think if you were to throttle such a bot to maybe a few submissions from serious sources per week, then it would likely work. I would guess that many submissions to /newest are indeed autogenerated.
It seems that a malicious person A who has a strong dislike or enmity for person B's projects could do some real harm by buying upvotes/clicks/likes for person B's projects, getting them banned from various services.
Make it look like person B naively went out and paid a third party upvote/promotion service, and make it obvious enough to be noticeable.
to use some old internet terminology, make it look like a joe-job astroturf?
> X was heavily upvoted by a criminal spam service that steals accounts from HN users and then sells upvotes and comments using the stolen accounts. That's basically the equivalent of a capital offense on HN and we ban accounts and sites that do it.
That to me means HN front page has a lot economic value. It is sometimes hard to judge HN, because by numbers it doesn't seems that big, but by impact sometimes it surprises me.
"It is sometimes hard to judge HN, because by numbers it doesn't seems that big, but by impact sometimes it surprises me."
It is about the audience, who comes here, to enjoy the crowd prefiltered content and comments, that is usually way higher than the average. There are quite some interesting (and rich or otherwise influential) people reading here.
So if you manage to bot upvote a submission to the frontpage - it looks like the hacker spirit supports it. Powerful guerilla marketing. So I think it is not surprising, that it is tried at times, but according to dang(moderator), it happens way less, than people do expect.
>It is sometimes hard to judge HN, because by numbers it doesn't seems that big, but by impact sometimes it surprises me.
True, you can find top dogs from tech field roaming around on HN. The front page or newest submissions are read by a pretty large number of individuals, by RSS Feeds or manually visiting the site.
If your submission like 'Show HN' hits the front page, it is similar to hitting the jackpot due to the overall impact it has for your project.
I suspect a well-timed front-page HN post with a lot of engagement could move a new fundraising valuation by tens or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars.
I blog about electronics, roughly every other month. Sometimes it’s about simple equipment repairs, but more often it’s esoteric stuff like JTAG debug interfaces. A few of my blog posts have hit the HN front page.
I never submit my new blog posts to HN, because I don’t need to: literally within minutes after announcing a new blog post on Twitter, somebody does that for me. Not always the same person either, and I have no idea who they are.
It’s very convenient, and nobody can accuse me of self promotion. :-)
I'm going to risk the downvote wrath but geerlingguy's rate of self-posting has annoyed me in the past. I did notice that the rate had dropped recently and am glad dang took proactive steps to communicate with geerlingguy to that end. That being said I am sorry you had to go through this recent experience and certainly never thought you should be banned.
Is there not a double standard going on here? Why is that an individual is almost banned for "spammy" behavior yet it seems that it is OK for a company to aggressively post to HN? I will give you an example - Cloudflare. Their CTO has posted to HN 7 times in the last two weeks. And his submissions are always promotional[1]. This individual posts something about Cloudflare every few days and sometimes even submits more than one Cloudflare post in a single day. This has been going on for years. As far as I can see Jeff Geerling isn't even selling anything. Are there different rules for companies vs individuals?
> dang is superhuman; I honestly have no idea how he and the rest of the tiny group (is it still just him and sctb?) that moderates HN keeps it a mostly civil place.
It’s the excellent moderation that makes Hacker News the only Internet forum that I regularly read – or occasionally contribute to.
Discussion here is such that I sometimes read the submitted link as an afterthought. Apart from the occasional distraction of a comment by dang, I had operated under the polite fiction that this was the result of self moderation.
Jeff's account leaves me conflicted. I resent heavy-handed, unaccountable moderation, and boy would I be pissed if I was accused of stealing accounts to upvote a HN story of all things. On the other hand, if the alternative is regressing to, say, USENET, what can I say?
[+] [-] caaqil|4 years ago|reply
Umm, no. Sometimes, it's just luck and timing. Many posts that are interesting hit/stay on the front page the second time someone posts it.
I don't think enough people browse the /newest queue. More people (myself included!) should browse /newest more often.
[+] [-] kgwxd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
For best results, it's important not to just post and repost your own stuff though. If you do that, our software will start interpreting your account history as promotional and will start enforcing this guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
It's best to build up a track record of interesting submissions from unrelated sources, and to intersperse your own articles with those. If you dig up interesting things from a variety of places, things people haven't run into before, then you'll be perceived as a community contributor rather than someone trying to market something. Particularly good are stories on out-of-the-way topics that rarely or never get attention. The best submissions are the ones that can't be predicted from any existing sequence (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
[+] [-] samwillis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbreaves|4 years ago|reply
That surge of viewers also resulted in a distinct up take of stars for days, almost a full week following the event lol. Word of mouth definitely kept it getting attention, but typically I see a few new stars a day. I don't really watch it that closely now though.
I am happy to have created an app that really resonates with a lot of tech users and programmers though.
[+] [-] sohkamyung|4 years ago|reply
Maybe it's related to the timezone I'm in (Singapore: UTC+8). When I post, most of the western hemisphere HN population is still asleep.
Side none: one time, I did get an email politely requesting that the upvotes for an item I posted be re-assigned to somebody (who posted the same content) with much lower karma. I was okay with that.
[+] [-] derekp7|4 years ago|reply
My conclusion is that if you can think of a click bait title, think of the complete polar opposite of click bait, and that is more likely to be looked at.
[+] [-] bravetraveler|4 years ago|reply
Scrolling newest submissions feels like digging for gold when I can just walk to the bank
Not that I disagree, just some context to offer. The internet is too big of a hose
[+] [-] robgibbons|4 years ago|reply
Karmabum ran for something like 24 hours, and got me some good karma, before users started complaining and I was quickly thereafter banned. Luckily, dang is very gracious and un-banned my account after I reached out, and to this day I have never botted my HN account again.
These days I use those skills for good, writing E2E tests :)
[+] [-] NicoJuicy|4 years ago|reply
A webapp like HN, but crawls RSS. There's a "Post to HN" button, when i think there's something interesting. So it's still a "manual process".
I think jacquesm will appreciate this one: https://ibb.co/BsZ95W5
[+] [-] hutrdvnj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|4 years ago|reply
Make it look like person B naively went out and paid a third party upvote/promotion service, and make it obvious enough to be noticeable.
to use some old internet terminology, make it look like a joe-job astroturf?
[+] [-] smegma2|4 years ago|reply
https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/how-to-handle-view-follow-b...
[+] [-] beckingz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jazzyjackson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|4 years ago|reply
That to me means HN front page has a lot economic value. It is sometimes hard to judge HN, because by numbers it doesn't seems that big, but by impact sometimes it surprises me.
[+] [-] hutzlibu|4 years ago|reply
It is about the audience, who comes here, to enjoy the crowd prefiltered content and comments, that is usually way higher than the average. There are quite some interesting (and rich or otherwise influential) people reading here.
So if you manage to bot upvote a submission to the frontpage - it looks like the hacker spirit supports it. Powerful guerilla marketing. So I think it is not surprising, that it is tried at times, but according to dang(moderator), it happens way less, than people do expect.
[+] [-] i67vw3|4 years ago|reply
True, you can find top dogs from tech field roaming around on HN. The front page or newest submissions are read by a pretty large number of individuals, by RSS Feeds or manually visiting the site.
If your submission like 'Show HN' hits the front page, it is similar to hitting the jackpot due to the overall impact it has for your project.
[+] [-] bpodgursky|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostlogin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tverbeure|4 years ago|reply
I never submit my new blog posts to HN, because I don’t need to: literally within minutes after announcing a new blog post on Twitter, somebody does that for me. Not always the same person either, and I have no idea who they are.
It’s very convenient, and nobody can accuse me of self promotion. :-)
[+] [-] loudtieblahblah|4 years ago|reply
;-)
[+] [-] tssva|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bogomipz|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jgrahamc
[+] [-] Anthony-G|4 years ago|reply
> dang is superhuman; I honestly have no idea how he and the rest of the tiny group (is it still just him and sctb?) that moderates HN keeps it a mostly civil place.
It’s the excellent moderation that makes Hacker News the only Internet forum that I regularly read – or occasionally contribute to.
[+] [-] asfarley|4 years ago|reply
Please continue posting and I hope that HN would consider some type of moderation that allows your content.
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x86_64Ubuntu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gabrielsroka|4 years ago|reply
As far as I can tell, Scott left in 2019, so it's just dang.
[+] [-] sillysaurusx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bm5k|4 years ago|reply
Thanks for all of the work you do.
[+] [-] gavinray|4 years ago|reply
Somehow he does though. 8th wonder of the world.
[+] [-] Markoff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vfulco2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggm|4 years ago|reply
Your context goes to "I almost got temporarily shut out of" as much as banning surely? Or is there something I missed about the longer-term?
[+] [-] geerlingguy|4 years ago|reply
I interpreted that as having some sort of permanence attached.
[+] [-] selfhoster11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lamontcg|4 years ago|reply
He's still using Munin in 2022? That's clearly the real story here.
Commence nerdfight...
[+] [-] geerlingguy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikewarot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SloopJon|4 years ago|reply
Jeff's account leaves me conflicted. I resent heavy-handed, unaccountable moderation, and boy would I be pissed if I was accused of stealing accounts to upvote a HN story of all things. On the other hand, if the alternative is regressing to, say, USENET, what can I say?
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thevagrant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pictur|4 years ago|reply
:)