7 ms·

When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page

197 points by readcodelearn 11y ago

Artemis2 11y ago
Is the time zone for your measurements Pacific Time?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- readcodelearn 11y ago
  Ah sorry, it should be EST, updated the article to say that :)
  - fredley 11y ago
    Great stuff, but please normalise to UTC in future. Everyone (reading this) knows their own offset from UTC and can probably makes sense of the data directly in that format. For anything else I have to go and lookup the offset between that timezone and mine.
    - scoppini 11y ago
      Not everyone knows the difference between their timezone and UTC. I always end up looking up the difference, and it really doesn't matter to me what timezone people use, so long as they state it.
    - jmiserez 11y ago
      (Disclaimer: I'm in Europe) For a website with a US centric audience, I think it makes perfect sense to use a US timezone: The graphs match up well with the sleep/wake patterns in the EST timezone. This makes interpreting the data a bit easier, i.e you can easily tell that there is a morning rush, a lunch rush, etc. (although interestingly, the HN audience doesn't seem to have well-defined break hours as there is just one large peak per day).
      - Artemis2 11y ago
        > The graphs match up well with the sleep/wake patterns in the EST I'd expect them to match more PST/PDT (-4h), that's where the Silicon Valley and YCombinator are.
      - ashitlerferad 11y ago
        HN doesn't seem US centric, there are people from all over the planet here.
    - nommm-nommm 11y ago
      I don't know my offset from UTC offhand.
qrv3w 11y ago
I was just searching this exact thing last week, and couldn't find any analysis. This is a terrific, thanks!
EGreg 11y ago
My early submissions to HN all hit the front page and were upvoted quite a bit, sometimes reaching #2 overall. But in the past couple years, nothing I submit ever hits the front page, even if it gets more points initially than the submissions before. Not only that, it doesn't appear even on pages 2-20. I wonder if there is a way to check if I'm being suppressed somehow as a contributor on HN. Source: see my past submissions.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  Note that the ranking algorithm has changed over time; which is why it's a good thing the OP's analysis is limited to a year.
minimaxir 11y ago
As someone who has looked into this area for Reddit and HN data, here are a few additional notes before everyone starts submitting their blog posts and marketing pieces to HN on weekday mornings: 1) After everything, the analysis is probabilistic. You are not guaranteed to get onto the front page just by submitting on at a high-probability time. 2) There are game-theoric implications; the more people submitting at a time (weekday mornings), the less likely people will see your post on /new before it is pushed off the first page, and it is highly unlikely to get upvotes once it has fallen off the top 30 slots. (hence the repost/second chance rules) 3) For obvious reasons, don't submit if there is important news occuring. (e.g. Apple/Google/Microsoft event) 4) Above all, if your submission does not get any upvotes, don't interpret it as your post being low quality. The median score of all submissions is 1-2 points regardless of time submitted. (http://i.imgur.com/SN5BuAJ.png http://i.imgur.com/SN5BuAJ.png) The OP is impressively throrough regardless, especially since working with ranking data-over-time is much better than working with raw data.
- sillysaurus3 11y ago
  The way to get onto the front page is to gratify your own curiosity, and then tell people about it. This article, for example.
  - minimaxir 11y ago
    To paraphrase the original article that inspired the OP, the Hacker News front page is not a meritocracy. There are optimizations that make your submission more likely to be upvoted (a simple one being a clickbait title). It is worth noting that this submission would have different behavior with the original title "You only need 3 votes to play, and other facts about the Hacker News frontpage." (and apparently it was just changed to that, and penalized?) That's also why a good moderation team is necessary and important; to fix submissions which are not inherently good, and to boost submissions which are not inherently bad.
    - ben_jones 11y ago
      Also I think there is something to be said about the comments section of the post. I rarely up vote anything, and if I do it's usually an afterthought after I've read a good discussion in the comments. I've also caught myself on multiple occasions up-voting a submission after I made a comment on it, simply so that my comment would become more visible and be up-voted. I think there are a lot of intricacies involved in these systems, and that they can be gamed for personal gain, ala much of reddit.
PaulHoule 11y ago
(i.e. aim for Europe, catch fire on the East Coast, then you are set up for the win on the West Coast)
forrestthewoods 11y ago
HN is frustrating. I've had two blog posts hit #1 in r/programming recently. Neither got more than 2 points on HN. I could be wrong but I think HN is more random than Reddit. Reddit has lots of randomness of course. But my gut says that escaping New on HN is harder and less predictable.
- sillysaurus3 11y ago
  So submit them again, if they're interesting. That's both allowed and encouraged here. Use your judgement though. It's a privilege to be able to do this. Three times over the course of a few days is probably fine. Four is probably too many.
  - forrestthewoods 11y ago
    Is it? I thought re-submission is frowned upon. I've also gotten "slow down, you're submitting too fast" when multiple days have passed. That might have been because I'd had a few comments get a bunch of downvotes? I comment a lot but almost never submit stories.
    - sillysaurus3 11y ago
      If the HN front page consisted of your content alone, I would be very happy. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=forrestthewoods https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=forrestthewoods https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/reverse-engineering-sublime-text-s-fuzzy-match-4cffeed33fdb#.ovs3w0fqv https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/reverse-engineering-sublime... https://gamedevdaily.io/four-ways-to-create-a-mesh-for-a-sphere-d7956b825db4?gi=7b9c7b2c0996#.5lzblag34 https://gamedevdaily.io/four-ways-to-create-a-mesh-for-a-sph... https://gamedevdaily.io/advanced-behavior-tree-structures-4b9dc0516f92#.95kzyvwwh https://gamedevdaily.io/advanced-behavior-tree-structures-4b... Speaking purely for myself, I hope to see them resubmitted. The post about reverse engineering Sublime's fuzzy matching algorithm is an overlooked gem, I think.
      - mintplant 11y ago
totony 11y ago
Just bot it to front page
- minimaxir 11y ago
  The voting ring detector has worked pretty well in my observations of posts in /new with unexpected amounts of karma.
q_revert 11y ago
I've only made two submissions. By some odd coincidence both made it to #1, which has scared me off making any further submissions for fear of ruining my perfect score! :D
Chris2048 11y ago
I wish there was post notification on HN :-/ I also think that people shouldn't post small projects that don't belong to them - If a project/site author wants to be on HN, send them an email and suggest it. They should pick their "release" date, and be prepared for HN traffic.
jakegarelick 11y ago
Has anyone had their submission automatically re-posted? My most upvoted submission was posted on a weekday night - the timestamp changed in the morning then it got several hundred upvotes.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  That is the second chance pool.
- jsnell 11y ago
  Yes, that is the moderators manually resurfacing good content that got no attention the first time. See for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313525
  - dang 11y ago
    Yes. For more info, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 and the other links there.
    - jsnell 11y ago
      Thanks, that's a better source than any I'd seen before. Have you thought about mentioning this in the FAQ? It seems to come up pretty often, and can be kind of confusing due to the timestamp manipulation.
      - dang 11y ago
        We will eventually, but the experiments haven't stabilized yet. There are still one or two major ideas we have yet to try.
- tromp 11y ago
  That happened to my post on the number of Go positions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10950875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10950875 Same pattern; I posted late at night and late in the morning the submission time was reset.
moonlighter 11y ago
Q: Where’s the safest place to hide a body? A: Page 2 of Hacker News.
- jabrams2 11y ago
  http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ and other sites provide an alternative view of HN posts to combat this issue.
robertelder 11y ago
Something that I've found to be very important in determining whether a submission is successful (here on HN and on reddit) is the first comment. If something has a handful of upvotes, people will often check the comments to see if the link is worth their time or not. If the first comment is "Wow, this is amazing! Why is this not on the front page?" you have a much better chance of making it than if the first comment is "This is blogspam. Move along." Once a post gets critical mass, and there is a conversation going on, people assume that the post is worth reading, and invest more time, which creates more upvotes. Of course, this isn't the best filtering mechanism since it is effectively the wisdom of the crowds.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
anotherevan 11y ago
The surest way to make the front page of Hacker News is to write an article about Hacker News.
cgtyoder 11y ago
Very meta
sohkamyung 11y ago
Is there a breakdown based on the rough IP location of the people who submits articles? I suspect that HN is also biased towards users in the western hemisphere; so much so that when people from East Asia (like me) post or comment, it is comparatively harder to accumulate points as our posting time is out of sync with when the majority of HN users will see them. I suppose one way out of this is to post when my local time is past midnight but I haven't reached the point where I value my HN points that highly compared to daily life...<grin>.
- lifeisstillgood 11y ago
  >> I haven't reached the point where I value my HN points that highly compared to daily life...<grin>. You will. :-) But mostly I would stop worrying about it. I am always surprised how one comment seems to find the one person able to make an interesting answer, and that's basically why I still come back. One point, one comment. And everything else is gravy.
- ximeng 11y ago
  To a reasonable first approximation, everyone on HN is in Silicon Valley, although "Not US" is still substantial. Here is previous survey I submitted, not sure if there's any better source. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583918
- Gustomaximus 11y ago
  http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com https://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=hacker%20news https://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=hacker%20news Not sure how accurate Alexa is. Generally between India, China, Australia and Indonesia they must pull a fair size audience.

197 points by readcodelearn 11y ago

Artemis2 11y ago

Is the time zone for your measurements Pacific Time?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
readcodelearn 11y ago
Ah sorry, it should be EST, updated the article to say that :)
- fredley 11y ago
  Great stuff, but please normalise to UTC in future. Everyone (reading this) knows their own offset from UTC and can probably makes sense of the data directly in that format. For anything else I have to go and lookup the offset between that timezone and mine.
  - scoppini 11y ago
    Not everyone knows the difference between their timezone and UTC. I always end up looking up the difference, and it really doesn't matter to me what timezone people use, so long as they state it.
  - jmiserez 11y ago
    (Disclaimer: I'm in Europe) For a website with a US centric audience, I think it makes perfect sense to use a US timezone: The graphs match up well with the sleep/wake patterns in the EST timezone. This makes interpreting the data a bit easier, i.e you can easily tell that there is a morning rush, a lunch rush, etc. (although interestingly, the HN audience doesn't seem to have well-defined break hours as there is just one large peak per day).
    - Artemis2 11y ago
      > The graphs match up well with the sleep/wake patterns in the EST I'd expect them to match more PST/PDT (-4h), that's where the Silicon Valley and YCombinator are.
    - ashitlerferad 11y ago
      HN doesn't seem US centric, there are people from all over the planet here.
  - nommm-nommm 11y ago
    I don't know my offset from UTC offhand.

qrv3w 11y ago

I was just searching this exact thing last week, and couldn't find any analysis. This is a terrific, thanks!

EGreg 11y ago

My early submissions to HN all hit the front page and were upvoted quite a bit, sometimes reaching #2 overall. But in the past couple years, nothing I submit ever hits the front page, even if it gets more points initially than the submissions before. Not only that, it doesn't appear even on pages 2-20. I wonder if there is a way to check if I'm being suppressed somehow as a contributor on HN. Source: see my past submissions.

minimaxir 11y ago
Note that the ranking algorithm has changed over time; which is why it's a good thing the OP's analysis is limited to a year.

minimaxir 11y ago

As someone who has looked into this area for Reddit and HN data, here are a few additional notes before everyone starts submitting their blog posts and marketing pieces to HN on weekday mornings: 1) After everything, the analysis is probabilistic. You are not guaranteed to get onto the front page just by submitting on at a high-probability time. 2) There are game-theoric implications; the more people submitting at a time (weekday mornings), the less likely people will see your post on /new before it is pushed off the first page, and it is highly unlikely to get upvotes once it has fallen off the top 30 slots. (hence the repost/second chance rules) 3) For obvious reasons, don't submit if there is important news occuring. (e.g. Apple/Google/Microsoft event) 4) Above all, if your submission does not get any upvotes, don't interpret it as your post being low quality. The median score of all submissions is 1-2 points regardless of time submitted. (http://i.imgur.com/SN5BuAJ.png http://i.imgur.com/SN5BuAJ.png) The OP is impressively throrough regardless, especially since working with ranking data-over-time is much better than working with raw data.

sillysaurus3 11y ago
The way to get onto the front page is to gratify your own curiosity, and then tell people about it. This article, for example.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  To paraphrase the original article that inspired the OP, the Hacker News front page is not a meritocracy. There are optimizations that make your submission more likely to be upvoted (a simple one being a clickbait title). It is worth noting that this submission would have different behavior with the original title "You only need 3 votes to play, and other facts about the Hacker News frontpage." (and apparently it was just changed to that, and penalized?) That's also why a good moderation team is necessary and important; to fix submissions which are not inherently good, and to boost submissions which are not inherently bad.
  - ben_jones 11y ago
    Also I think there is something to be said about the comments section of the post. I rarely up vote anything, and if I do it's usually an afterthought after I've read a good discussion in the comments. I've also caught myself on multiple occasions up-voting a submission after I made a comment on it, simply so that my comment would become more visible and be up-voted. I think there are a lot of intricacies involved in these systems, and that they can be gamed for personal gain, ala much of reddit.

PaulHoule 11y ago

(i.e. aim for Europe, catch fire on the East Coast, then you are set up for the win on the West Coast)

forrestthewoods 11y ago

HN is frustrating. I've had two blog posts hit #1 in r/programming recently. Neither got more than 2 points on HN. I could be wrong but I think HN is more random than Reddit. Reddit has lots of randomness of course. But my gut says that escaping New on HN is harder and less predictable.

sillysaurus3 11y ago
So submit them again, if they're interesting. That's both allowed and encouraged here. Use your judgement though. It's a privilege to be able to do this. Three times over the course of a few days is probably fine. Four is probably too many.
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  Is it? I thought re-submission is frowned upon. I've also gotten "slow down, you're submitting too fast" when multiple days have passed. That might have been because I'd had a few comments get a bunch of downvotes? I comment a lot but almost never submit stories.
  - sillysaurus3 11y ago
    If the HN front page consisted of your content alone, I would be very happy. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=forrestthewoods https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=forrestthewoods https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/reverse-engineering-sublime-text-s-fuzzy-match-4cffeed33fdb#.ovs3w0fqv https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/reverse-engineering-sublime... https://gamedevdaily.io/four-ways-to-create-a-mesh-for-a-sphere-d7956b825db4?gi=7b9c7b2c0996#.5lzblag34 https://gamedevdaily.io/four-ways-to-create-a-mesh-for-a-sph... https://gamedevdaily.io/advanced-behavior-tree-structures-4b9dc0516f92#.95kzyvwwh https://gamedevdaily.io/advanced-behavior-tree-structures-4b... Speaking purely for myself, I hope to see them resubmitted. The post about reverse engineering Sublime's fuzzy matching algorithm is an overlooked gem, I think.
    - mintplant 11y ago

totony 11y ago

Just bot it to front page

minimaxir 11y ago
The voting ring detector has worked pretty well in my observations of posts in /new with unexpected amounts of karma.

q_revert 11y ago

I've only made two submissions. By some odd coincidence both made it to #1, which has scared me off making any further submissions for fear of ruining my perfect score! :D

Chris2048 11y ago

I wish there was post notification on HN :-/ I also think that people shouldn't post small projects that don't belong to them - If a project/site author wants to be on HN, send them an email and suggest it. They should pick their "release" date, and be prepared for HN traffic.

jakegarelick 11y ago

Has anyone had their submission automatically re-posted? My most upvoted submission was posted on a weekday night - the timestamp changed in the morning then it got several hundred upvotes.

minimaxir 11y ago
That is the second chance pool.
jsnell 11y ago
Yes, that is the moderators manually resurfacing good content that got no attention the first time. See for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313525
- dang 11y ago
  Yes. For more info, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 and the other links there.
  - jsnell 11y ago
    Thanks, that's a better source than any I'd seen before. Have you thought about mentioning this in the FAQ? It seems to come up pretty often, and can be kind of confusing due to the timestamp manipulation.
    - dang 11y ago
      We will eventually, but the experiments haven't stabilized yet. There are still one or two major ideas we have yet to try.
tromp 11y ago
That happened to my post on the number of Go positions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10950875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10950875 Same pattern; I posted late at night and late in the morning the submission time was reset.

moonlighter 11y ago

Q: Where’s the safest place to hide a body? A: Page 2 of Hacker News.

jabrams2 11y ago
http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ and other sites provide an alternative view of HN posts to combat this issue.

robertelder 11y ago

Something that I've found to be very important in determining whether a submission is successful (here on HN and on reddit) is the first comment. If something has a handful of upvotes, people will often check the comments to see if the link is worth their time or not. If the first comment is "Wow, this is amazing! Why is this not on the front page?" you have a much better chance of making it than if the first comment is "This is blogspam. Move along." Once a post gets critical mass, and there is a conversation going on, people assume that the post is worth reading, and invest more time, which creates more upvotes. Of course, this isn't the best filtering mechanism since it is effectively the wisdom of the crowds.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

anotherevan 11y ago

The surest way to make the front page of Hacker News is to write an article about Hacker News.

cgtyoder 11y ago

Very meta

sohkamyung 11y ago

Is there a breakdown based on the rough IP location of the people who submits articles? I suspect that HN is also biased towards users in the western hemisphere; so much so that when people from East Asia (like me) post or comment, it is comparatively harder to accumulate points as our posting time is out of sync with when the majority of HN users will see them. I suppose one way out of this is to post when my local time is past midnight but I haven't reached the point where I value my HN points that highly compared to daily life...<grin>.

lifeisstillgood 11y ago
>> I haven't reached the point where I value my HN points that highly compared to daily life...<grin>. You will. :-) But mostly I would stop worrying about it. I am always surprised how one comment seems to find the one person able to make an interesting answer, and that's basically why I still come back. One point, one comment. And everything else is gravy.
ximeng 11y ago
To a reasonable first approximation, everyone on HN is in Silicon Valley, although "Not US" is still substantial. Here is previous survey I submitted, not sure if there's any better source. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583918
Gustomaximus 11y ago
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com https://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=hacker%20news https://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=hacker%20news Not sure how accurate Alexa is. Generally between India, China, Australia and Indonesia they must pull a fair size audience.