7 ms·
How to hit the Hacker News front page (and what it’s worth)
- atomical 16y ago"Several job offers with companies I respect" This is a powerful outcome of writing frequently on the web. Have any other bloggers experienced this?
- luu 16y agoYes, even though my blog is incredibly lame by HN standards (or any standards, really). I imagine that people who post actual content must have to beat off recruiters with a stick.
- patio11 16y agoNot meaning to toot my own horn, but just to give a testimonial for blogging: At the client I'm working for right now initial contact was at C-level. (At a software company which you've heard of.) That isn't the first time that happened, either -- if people are really interested in what you have to say, recruiters, resumes, and the HR department are not merely bypassed, they're never even thought of.
- eitally 16y agoTrue story! This is obvious and old hat for the more experienced corporate drones here, but it's important for all the newbies to understand that [all, but especially HR] processes and policies are made to be broken, and they are often so dysfunctional in large corporations that if someone at an appropriate level wants something done, it will be done. (My personal experience suggests that managers and below have 0 power, and only directors+ start being able to work the informal network.)
- atomical 16y agoIs it not only what you say but what you release? Are companies interested in the minimum viable products (Show HN:...) that bloggers and hackers release? I have been looking for a job for months now and I am wondering if this could be a point of entry.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jacobolus 16y agoMy take on this “secret”, in fewer words: claim personal expertise and experience and make some emphatic claim (esp. w/ an emphatic title) about a topic where people will either agree with your point from their own experience, or have some existing opinion (who doesn't have an opinion about facebook?), then make sure you get it in front of a bunch of Hacker News readers (perhaps via some other mechanism, like twitter). The facebook gripe post wasn’t completely linkbait-y, since it provided a nice basis for a solid discussion, but by itself it was pretty light on substance. I’d personally much prefer to see gripes with more meat on them; “show, don’t tell”.
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoI actually agree on the post being light on substance; I was completely blown away at the level of response it got. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if it hadn't made the frontpage at all.
- blasdel 16y agoMax Klein applies your take as religion, trolling HN with emphatic claims of personal experience. And he doesn't even exist: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353050 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353050
- rms 16y agoDude totally exists, he sent me a free Xbox. (shocking news alert -- rms is an alias I use on the internet sometimes. Nevertheless, I also exist.)
- blasdel 16y agoI know you exist, I've met you :) He exists too, but his name isn't Max Klein, and 'parable' is the most charitable reading of most of what he posts under that persona.
- grandalf 16y agoThis blog post is like an infomercial selling a book on how to make your own infomercial. Flag!
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoOuch. I'm not really selling anything, just thought people who write for this audience might be interested in what I had found out through the process. Why does the HN crowd have such an issue with people promoting themselves even slightly? If the content is good and people like it, they'll vote it up...I don't see the problem with trying to fit your product to the HN market. Edit: in fairness, this blog post title was too sensational, so I've changed the HN post to be less so. Unintentional, but still, my apologies.
- grandalf 16y agoSorry about the negativity. I actually didn't read your post that made it to the same page for the same reason (overly sensational title). If you look at Digg or Reddit they are essentially just bit lists of overly sensational titles. One thing I like about HN is that we manage to mostly avoid that... and titles are generally fairly informative. I typically only downvote/flag stories that have overly sensational titles, b/c I view them as bait for the more cursory of readers, who don't generally make thoughtful comments b/c their attention span is calibrated toward sensational, dopamine trigger words. I've found that if a post makes it to the HN front page it's generally quality reading, so a sensational title actually provides a signal not to read it.
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoYou found "Why I stopped building Facebook apps for clients" to be an overly sensational title? What would you have called it?
- grandalf 16y agoI'm not saying sensational titles aren't great for marketing. I think something like "My Thoughts on Facebook's Apps platform API"
- pg 16y agoHmm, I should add protections against this phenomenon. Should be straightforward.
- perokreco 16y agoWhy protection, isn't the fact that people are submitting the story actually a powerful indicator it is a good one?
- RossM 16y agoAgreed, if anything I think submitting a pre-existing story should actually be worth more score than upvoting it. The problem lies if people give out submit links pre-loaded with the submission URL/title (if that's possible?).
- hotmind 16y agoBut if you form a cabal to make front page of HN - whether your clique be Twitter followers or a "group of friends" on this site - it's gaming the system. Essentially, that is what the article advocated (oh, and write interesting content - duh).
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoA "cabal" typically refers to a group secretly united to promote their own interests. I'm not sure that tweeting a link to a blog post meets that criteria.
- lhnz 16y agoA cabal of voters could easily be setup on HN. That is problematic.
- staunch 16y agoEasy fix: submitting a duplicate URL should not cause an automatic upvote. This has always seemed a bit off to me.
- ramanujan 16y agopg: what about allowing people to spend down their own karma to get an important post onto the front page? Sort of like Stackoverflow's bounty system. You could start with a 1:1 exchange rate and tweak it over time.
- jballanc 16y agoOuch...points with no value already entice people to attempt to hoard and game the system to gain more. I don't want to think of what would happen if these points were suddenly given a tangible value.
- jasonkester 16y agoI'm curious why you didn't include this tactic in your "BAD" list. There's really no difference between creating a bunch of accounts on your own to upvote a story and getting a bunch of other people to do it for you. You're still artificially generating a bunch of votes for a story right at the moment of submission, therefore gaming the system.
- gjm11 16y agoSure there's a difference. If you create a bunch of your own accounts to upvote a story, then all those upvotes collectively convey the following information: "One person liked this". (Worse still, that one person is the person who wrote it; so, near enough zero information.) If you instead write something that lots of people upvote, then all those upvotes convey the following information: "Lots of people liked this." Now, it's still bad that they "liked" it only because they know who wrote it and think he's generally interesting. The outcome for HN is probably still that what's on the front page doesn't match what's most interesting as well as everyone would like. But the problem is low-quality real information, not fake information. It's not bad in the same way at all.
- grovulent 16y agoI think people need to be rewarded somehow for reading and voting on stories on the new page. If everyone has to develop a cabal to get to the front page, then over time the size of the cabals will have to grow because of the increased competition - eventually squeezing out the little guy, no matter how good his content is. With an active userbase on the new page cabals would be less likely to form.
- steveklabnik 16y agoI occasionally add HN links to something that I submit on Twitter, especially when I think it's something people would really like to see. I have to do this because of this exact effect, if it doesn't hit the front page, then it never takes off. For example, yesterday, I tweeted this: http://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/25811540605 http://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/25811540605 Which resulted in this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1736805 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1736805 Which is cool, but it was on the home page for about 5 minutes total, because those votes came too slowly for it to hit the front page. That's all good and fine, but then today, I wake up and see this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1738560 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1738560 Which is just blogspam, but shows that this story is important, because it ended up getting lots of comments. I'm not sure how to make this better, just providing a recent example.
- hugh3 16y agoI think two things need to be done: 1. Encourage more people to monitor the "new" page, and 2. Slow down the submission of crap to the "new" page. For instance, why is there no karma threshold for submitting new links? I just had a quick look, and there's several new links from someone trying to sell holidays to Vietnam with an account that was created eighteen minutes ago.
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoAgreed, and once those are done, I think some exposure of new stories on the homepage (similar to Reddit) would also be helpful.
- detst 16y ago> 1. Encourage more people to monitor the "new" page, and Even though I know what "new" does, I seem to interpret it as "create something new" instead of "view new submissions". Maybe I'm just an odd person but I think changing that to "newest" could make a difference if there are more people like me, especially for new users.
- 16y ago
- ck2 16y agoThe most surprising part of that was the ad revenue. I wouldn't think the HN crowd are big ad clickers (if they see the ads in the first place).
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoWell, the CPM was pretty abysmal: about $.40.