Ask HN: I feel that my submissions are severely underrated. What to do?

[s9w]

During the last 90 days I submitted 4 stories. None gathered even a single point, although they were moderately successful on Reddit. My submissions happened at a good time, had descriptive titles and similar submissions gathered significant more traction. Maybe not all of them are prefect for the HN audience but they were all high quality and the result was as surprising as disappointing. Am I doing something wrong besides not making my friends vote?

Fore reference: Here are the submissions:

- Yesterday: Show HN about a font comparison tool I wrote. Was on r/programming front page for almost an entire day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9957472

- A webGL visualization of a diffusion process. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9605938

- An article (IPython Notebook) about generating a gauss-distributed number range. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9499845

- An article (IPython Notebook) about the 2D Ising model and a program I wrote about to solve it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9546872

[chrisbennet]

>What to do?

Stop caring about your internet popularity points? (And it don't mean that in a snarky way.)

While I realize many people view HN as an an advertising media for their personal "brand", I prefer to think of submissions as a gift to the community that doesn't require their validation or thank-you.

[lewisl9029]

I don't think it's all about popularity or branding.

The community does suffer when genuinely interesting stories slip through /newest without getting any attention.

If we can do anything about it, I think we should.

[jayturley]

I was gonna say this, but now I'll just second it.

[joshstrange]

> Am I doing something wrong besides not making my friends vote?

No, you're not doing anything wrong, I've found HN to be very hit or miss. As other commenters have pointed out the first few votes (in <30min) are the ones that matter most. If you can get 4+ you have a chance of being on the first few pages of HN and from there it's truly up to the content before that... Luck.

I've posted blog posts (of mine) before and had them do quite well (top 5 or better on front page) and other on other interesting topics (like "My experience with Coin and why it will ultimately fail" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9929531) not get a single vote (though I have seen a jump in page visits after submitting). All of that said I would suggest against trying to get friends to vote on your posts as you could get (shadow) banned for running a "voting ring" even though 4-6 votes would allow your post to compete (It's hard to resist I know).

[dang]

The problem of good stories not escaping /newest is real. There is a bit of sample bias in your question, though. Your two submissions before those four did ok: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8881488 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8589671. Two out of six doesn't sound as bad as zero out of four.

Arguably those two were more appealing HN submissions than the subsequent four. The font post and the WebGL demo are both the sort of thing users have seen a lot of, and the other two were pretty specialized. But there's so much randomness in what gets traction that it's impossible to know for sure.

To mitigate this randomness, a small number of reposts are ok when a story hasn't had significant attention yet. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, plus a recent discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9828818. But please don't delete an earlier submission in order to repost it. Instead just use a slightly different URL to get past the duplicate detector.

Titles may make a difference. I think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9546872 buried the lede: "Algorithms, physics and pictures from the Ising model (ipynb and c++ program)" isn't as clear as the article's actual title: "Magnets: How do they work? Exploring the 2D Ising model". Not everyone knows what the Ising model is, but everybody loves magnets. Similarly, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9605938 should at least have had "Show HN" on it, and maybe could have been clearer.

[jacquesm]

HN has a very limited amount of front page area and the new page scrolls by insanely fast. Depending on the number of spammers active when you submit you might not even be on the homepage for more than 15 minutes. So if you want to help out then I suggest visiting the new page frequently, upvoting the good stuff (keep an eye out for dupes, and remember to check pages 2 and 3 as well) and flagging spam, those are the biggest factors in getting quality content noticed and not doing these things by enough people are a major factor in good content being lost.

How to spot a spammer...

It's a bit of a Bayesian approach but these factors help me to decide whether to flag content or not:

- new account

- no comment participation (or maybe just a 'test' comment)

- first link posted within seconds of account creation

- low quality content

- always submitting the same domain

- re-submitting the same url over and over again

- many submissions per day

If it's a 'mild case' then I flag the entry, if it is more serious (10+ submissions in a relatively short time for instance) then I mail the moderators.

[cdvonstinkpot]

I once got an email from one of the HN mods asking me to re-submit one of my posts (w/ a new URL) that they noticed didn't get the amount of attention it was worth. They said a re-submit function might be implemented for worthy posts which deserve more attention if their test works out.

[informatimago]

Oh, that's why I see duplicate posts on /news... I'll have to filter them out.

[hermanmerman]

There are 25 links on /new, the oldest being 27 min ago. So your post has 27 minutes to gather the attention of enough people (7-8 upvotes is OK) to actually surface to the frontpage. This is not a lot fo time, especially for IPython Notebooks which need time to be read/appreciated. Maybe reddit is the community you need :/

[s9w]

I can agree only partially. That's basically similar to the problem that imageposts are vastly more popular than anything else on reddit etc. But HN does have a huge focus on quality posts and takes big measures to ensure that. Also the notebooks were with many colorful pictures (and even videos!), and that even applies only to the two least relevant submissions.

[brock_r]

>> especially for IPython Notebooks which need time to be read/appreciated.

I agree wholeheartedly. You need to capture people's attention in 5 seconds or so.

That means visuals, soundbites, summaries, "what's-in-it-for-me", etc. You are in the media business whether you want to be or not.

Not that many people like wading thru two pages of math just to see if they might find something interesting.

[mswen]

I noted that even when a submission doesn't get any comments on HN or any upvotes - I still get 6 to 10 referral hits on a story I published on my blog. Of course I would hope that people might become engaged enough to comment or upvote on HN but I am at least moderately pleased that I got some kind of visit out of posting on HN.

[giltleaf]

That's true for me as well. I try and follow a policy that if the title is curious enough to get me to click it (which only works because people are good here about not posting clickbait), I will give it an upvote as long as the article isn't complete trash.

[DanielBMarkham]

Welcome to the club.

It's a lottery. You submit an article -- an if enough people in a narrow niche are online at that exact time, read the article, and come back and vote? You're in the game.

It's not a meritocracy. Not even close. If you like submitting, keep it up! I do. But don't expect any feedback, positive or negative, unfortunately.

[Turing_Machine]

"It's not a meritocracy. Not even close."

In one sense, but in others it kinda is. It's really a mixture. It has to be both good and lucky.

"Total crap" implies "will not make front page", but the converse is not true. "Will not make the front page" doesn't really imply anything, much less "total crap".

Or so I see it, having had several articles make the front page and others that seemed to me to be of equal (or in some cases, greater) interest sink without a trace.

[rwhitman]

HN has a bit more diverse mix of users than r/programming, including a healthy amount of non-technical or semi-technical people, so my suggestion would be giving some context to the project in a blog post rather than only linking to the github page might help.

The day and time of your post submission also has an enormous weight on what makes it to the front page. Great article about this from a few years back: http://silverman.svbtle.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker-...

[waterlesscloud]

The first few votes are the crucial ones. Once you have those, your submission has enough visibility that it will get a fair shake based on its quality.

The problem is those first few votes are essentially random. You can't do anything about it. Just keep submitting.

[mcnamaratw]

Those sound very interesting to me. I wish I'd seen them, and I'm going to go visit your 2nd and 4th links right now.

HN just has a lot of traffic all going through one main view. Unless a submission proves that the government is taking away (and/or restoring) our anonymity/privilege/guns/lisp/java/bitcoins, it's pretty hard to get shelf space.

Regarding rating ... except for submissions optimized purely for popularity, I don't think upvotes are a "rating" at all. I could easily see Marcus Aurelius getting four upvotes and Caligula getting 500. That's not their Emperor Rating.

EDIT: The DLA thing is cool.

[danso]

That font-compare tool is pretty cool...you should definitely resubmit in a few days. Thanks for pointing it out (and making it).

[S4M]

I had a brief look at your article about gauss-distributed number range, and I am sorry to say that I don't find it particularly interesting, it's just some basic probabilities notion.

[bbcbasic]

I think the more specialized and geeky the topic, the fewer people who can participate in the conversation about it, and therefore the less popular it will be.

Most of the popular stuff seems to be light on the technical side. More often it is business, lifestyle or a high level opinion on a technical subject, not too deep.

If it is an online hacked-up app, there has to be a wow factor, a surprise, a 'why didn't I think of that'.

[logfromblammo]

It's pretty much a not-quite-random lottery. If you got no up-votes or replies the first time around, you can try resubmitting at a different time of day.

Please don't engage in shady, SEO-like practices to try to game the system. Such practices represent an existential risk to the integrity of the community, and an undue burden upon the site operators and moderators.

[lewisl9029]

I always thought that instead of just encouraging people to check the /newest page, wouldn't it be more effective to just make the front page be a split view between /newest and /new (the current front page)?

[dang]

Couple problems: that would be a dramatic change to the front page; and evidence suggests that people would eventually just tune out the /newest part.

We tested randomly placing stories from /newest onto the front page, but it didn't work—the median story is far too poor in quality. It basically just mixed junk into the front page, arguably the worst thing one could do to the front page. If we had rolled that out to everyone as a feature, the main effect would have been a spike in "why is this on Hacker News" comments.

[jessaustin]

This submission already has 23 points. Congratulations!

Seriously, though, the only way to "win" is to play a lot. Four submissions in 90 days is nothing. Try to get that down to four submissions in a week for better results.

[s9w]

But that is only feasible if you submit things you don't create yourself. Or you're a "rockstar programmer". There is only so much stuff people can do

[smoyer]

Perhaps there are enough of us using Reddit that we don't bother reading the same content here? What happens if you submit here first (and Reddit later)?

[s9w]

It was always HN first

[gearoidoc]

HN is far from a meritocracy I'm afraid.

[danso]

Er...what would a meritocracy even be in this situation? The world of interesting posts is not so simple that there is one true, obvious metric for one makes one post better than another.

[scarmig]

Hacker News is very centralized: there's one main view that 99% of people see, and the vagaries of whether you end up on it are dependent on whether the train of someone who might upvote it was late today, or whether standup ran over.

If it's any consolation, Hacker News points track the drachma in value very closely.