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How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page
- earthboundkid 3y agoIn Rust
- tpoacher 3y ago> Obviously, the goal is to get traffic to your website ok sure. Why not. > and increase brand awareness […] Hm. HN isn't Google. Brand awareness isn't always positive. There are several examples here where repeated coverage causes knee jerk negative reactions. > SEO Yes, that is a problem. If every time someone posts about grammarly or whatnot, if the Google algorithm doesn't care that people are vomiting with disgust in the comments, and treats that as "engagement", that is a problem. Then again, you run the risk of having a page full of "omg grammarly is so shit" comments at the top of your Google ranking, so maybe that's appropriately Darwinian in a sense. (No hate on grammarly, I just couldn't think of something more HN specific right now)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nkurz 3y agoVouched for and upvoted because I think it's important for readers here to see how much effort goes into creating posts that game the system. I think it's better for these strategies to be known than hidden. It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread. There's a definite tension between the rule of not accusing other users of being shills and the reality that there are quite a few shills out there. I think it a still good rule, but not because it's never right. Rather, the rule is good because the false accusations do more harm than letting some shilling slip by.
- bombcar 3y agoThere’s a silent part of that rule: if you suspect a shill, gather the evidence and present it to dang via email.
- dang 3y agoYes please. Edit: actually not so silent - it's the latter part of this guideline from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." It's part of the contract we have with HN users - we ask them not to post this stuff in the threads, but in return we always look into cases that they report to us directly.
- marketingLizard 3y agoHow long do shill posts last before they've been taken care of?
- burnished 3y agoJust out of curiosity, what sort of answer are you expecting? Your post reads as vaguely accusatory to me - like you're implying that messes are being left intentionally
- svnt 3y agoAccounting for their username they are either making a joke or trying to assess the potential performance of the strategy even if they get flagged.
- hamallama 3y agoShills don't care about their accounts, just that they spray their message around. Just curious if the silent system works fast enough. For my curiosity, by the way, my account was rate limited. Thanks Dang.
- Operyl 3y agoYour account was likely rate limited because you decided to make a new account here, and new accounts have severe limitations on rate of posting comments. You could have just as easily decided to use your existing account and would've been fine.
- jsnell 3y agoRight, I'd say that this post has more value than any of the repetitive content marketing these folks churned out for a few years, since it hopefully makes some HN readers a bit more aware that they're being played. But the interesting question is: why did they write this article? Is it just that the jig is up, and their one weird trick no longer works as well as it did? Did they get asked to cut it out by the HN moderators? It seems plausible given how many recent submissions to this domain appear to be auto-dead. Do they just think HN readers will forget about this article, and upvote their next bit of content marketing anyway?
- muchtest 3y agoReminds me of the scene with the Mortgage Brokers in The Big Short - "They're not confessing, they're bragging"
- roenxi 3y ago> ...since it hopefully makes some HN readers a bit more aware that they're being played. How are they being played? There isn't any deception here. The plan Iron Brands touts is literally "submit interesting articles first". That is what people are trying to upvote.
- UncleEntity 3y agoSounds to me like they’re scraping the submission pool and “front running” with their “dog whistle detector” chatbot in order to get people to read their marketing paragraph tacked on to the end of the article. Providing liquidity to the news market as the quaints would say. If they were doing original research or scraping the web to bring stuff here, fine, good for them. If all they’re doing is repackaging already submitted articles in order to drive traffic to their website then, IDK?
- imgabe 3y agoIt doesn't sound like they're front-running. Fetch data from Hacker News API Set up Google Alerts for your query Fetch data from Google Alerts XML Enrich data and store in SQLite file with a cronjob Send alerts with other cronjob to Twist API or Telegram API I think the "Fetch data from Hacker News API" part is just to get keywords from popular submissions that they use to make Google Alerts for. Then when new stories about those keywords show up, they can write an article first.
- ouid 3y agothe rule against calling other people shills is the worst part of hackernews. Skepticism is important, and important to share. I have never been anything but grateful to read a comment pointing out that another comment was obviously a shill. Perhaps I have been embarrassed for not seeing the obvious truth, but always grateful.
- johnny22 3y agoI love that rule. I've gotten called a shill for microsoft many times when I've mentioned some of the cool aspects of their OS design, especially vs Linux. The thing is, I use linux almost exclusively, but for occasional cross platform testing in a vm. I really dislike being called a shill just for recognizing some neat ideas.
- twelve40 3y agoBut that's just a sign of the other person's low intelligence and laziness (launching into ad hominem instead of putting in the work to attempt to entertain your point of view). What's more tiring for me is coming up with incessant caveats that no, i don't have anything to do with this company, no, i don't agree with everything they do but they did one cool thing here, etc etc. Make one remark about e.g. Tesla's technology without those massive caveats and a bunch of people will show up and happily hijack your thread onto a bewildering and useless tangent...
- Kiro 3y agoI would bet 99% of the "obvious shills" are actually not shills at all.
- dang 3y agoYes. In fact, probably more than that. (long sibling comment about this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851)
- yuliyp 3y agoA comment attacking someone for being a shill is expressing skepticism in the most trivial way, and serves to throw a debate into a flamewar rather than actually discussing the flaws of their arguments.
- gumballindie 3y ago> It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread. I suspect there may already be openai shills around here. While not using chatgpt for spam they may still be promoting it like mad. Notice there are few alternatives shared and open source models are much less frequently mentioned.
- bumbledraven 3y agoThat’s because every model sucks for complicated tasks compared to GPT-4, and no one aside from OpenAI has a model more capable that GPT-3.5.
- gumballindie 3y agoAnd apple is the only laptop manufacturer and tesla the only electric car. The world out there is full of better options.
- dangwhy 3y ago> It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread. Do you think its possible for generated content to hit frontpage. I thought most of the stuff it generated is pretty prosaic. Also not sure if have an objection to chatgpt content hitting frontpage.
- idopmstuff 3y agoAssuming it does so by getting legitimately upvoted by us regular human HN readers, I don't see a problem with it.
- j45 3y agoWhen you do the work and understand it, is it a hack (short cut) or just learning to deliver what the HN audience and algorithm values?
- j45 3y agoTo be clear, the article was really good at outlining how to create high quality content.
- kuba_dmp 3y agoAlso you have companies that "game the system" by just creating great stuff that bring value to this community. Look at Tailscale for example. You can just do marketing things that are perfectly aligned with the community. That is a win win imho. plug: If interested I went into how tailscale does it https://www.developermarkepear.com/blog/developer-marketing-hacker-news https://www.developermarkepear.com/blog/developer-marketing-...
- tpmx 3y ago(Yes, I acknowledge that this stuff is hard, and that a lot of effort is going into it.) It feels like HN moderation is mostly focused on getting the comments interesting, not about getting the stories interesting. HN needs to step up its game here, IMO. There's way too much gamed crap reaching the front page. It seems especially bad during European office hours when the Californians are asleep.
- dang 3y agoWhat are some examples of posts that looked like gamed crap to you? I wouldn't say moderation is more focused on interesting comments than interesting stories - at least not consciously or intentionally.
- tpmx 3y agoI'll try to make a list over the coming week or so and email you.
- UncleEntity 3y ago> It seems especially bad during European office hours when the Californians are asleep. Agreed, the people outside of the SV bubble submit and upvote different stuff and downvote the hell out of anybody who disputes their Eco-Marxist worldview. Which is fine, just wish they’d be more open to debate instead of just squashing opposing points of view.
- shever73 3y agoSorry in advance for the grumpy response, but I hate articles like this and I detest the manipulation of an organic voting mechanism for self-promotion. I know this is the Internet we have to live with, but this kind of stuff just makes it a worse place to be.
- dmbche 3y agoWell then again, the articles they write and post (seem?) To have value, as they are written "with reaserach, without bs" and on newsworthy subjects... I see this less as "gaming HN" than "realising what the niche is" and fulfilling the niche. I guess I'm fine with someone posting first about a subject that will be there anyway? Maybe I'm not seeing something.
- shever73 3y agoIt’s possible (likely) that I’m not seeing something too. I read the article in the spirit of the headline, which is basically: we wrote a bot to tell us stuff that would do well on HN so we can shill our/our clients’ stuff. In other words, HN becomes an echo chamber of rephrased news articles recycled into commercial blogspam.
- johnchristopher 3y agoWell, contrary to what was written today in a comment I almost replied to [0] it's more hacker news than hacker news [1]. So they didn't really hack HN, they merely provided content HN likes and did at the right time. I wonder if they could hack it more by only providing divisive content that feeds on outrage. That'd bring comments and points but most likely no new clients or conversions. Oh, and I have a good example of that ! The other days there was a submission about a font from intel designed for visually deficient programmers. I got curious and installed it then I started thinking about ligatures in code, googled a bit and read https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fonts-hell-no.html https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fon... I found the article interesting and decided to submit it but when pasting the title I thought "uh, with a title like that, there's going to be some strong reactions/opinions" and indeed the top comment thread is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35926574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35926574 [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927503 >> Can someone explain me why people post links to Wikipedia articles without any context? > For the exact same reason people post links to other things, it's interesting. It's always been more "hacker" than "news" here.* [1] It's branding/marketing/groupthink...
- detaro 3y agolooking at the submission history for their domain... well, not that consistent and one of their accounts seems to be automatically killed by the spam filter. :D But I guess this confirms the blogspammy feeling I got from them sometimes.
- koboll 3y agoIf you read it, a big part of the secret sauce is "actually be thoughtful and informative". Like they drop everything to investigate something and surface useful information and insights as part of the process. Seems like the opposite of spam honestly.
- hackernewds 3y agonice try Indiehacker ;) next article: how we astroturf Hacker news. not too far-fetched given they're open to manipulating public sentiment on this platform
- samwillis 3y agoWrite or build anything meta Hacker News... But seriously, create good, intellectually interesting content that people will upvote.
- everybodyknows 3y ago> No self-promotion or any CTA’s in the text What is a "CTA"?
- detaro 3y ago"Call To Action" (= "sign up now!" etc)
- everybodyknows 3y ago> You can post multiple times: HN understands that quality posts can go unnoticed, ... Yes, anecdata: A number of my own highest-quality finds have sink with barely a ripple on the "new" page. > ... so you can try the same post again. Don’t overdo it. I would say max 2 or 3 times. Most legit posters have better uses for their remaining lifetime minutes of brain activity than to game HN in such a tedious exercise. Various software mitigations to recover credit for otherwise lost quality posts occur to me, but the coding effort looks substantial.
- dang 3y agoWhat are some of the high-quality finds that sank without a trace? Maybe we could send repost invites to put them in the second-chance pool! (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308)
- everybodyknows 3y agoThanks for asking -- among the more recent I'd suggest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35116604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35116604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34882140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34882140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34790548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34790548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34700099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34700099
- dang 3y agoThanks! Those are more topical submissions than we would normally put in the second-chance pool. For that we're looking for more out-of-the-way stories, less in the flow of news or current affairs and of a little more deeper interest. The other thing about some of those submissions is that they're a bit on the political side—not so much as to be off topic for HN (there's inevitably some political overlap [1]) but again, not the sort of quieter/curious story that we're looking to augment. I think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35319250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35319250 has more of those qualities though, so I've sent you a repost invite for it :) [1] ;https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoSo provide quality content, that readers like, in a timely manner. That's not hacking. That's how HN is supposed to work.
- robust-cactus 3y agoOk so, different take - if this what people call "gaming the system" I'm all for it. All this article says is that hackernews likes interesting, informative posts that actually tell a real story. And I for one am here for that all day. So yes, everyone take this strategy and make great content.
- waboremo 3y agoIn other words, they had to hack their own system to get anyone to pay attention to the advice of creating informative articles with a story to tell.
- thewildginger 3y agoThis is like that 4chan post about a guy who tries to cheat on a test and ends up studying and does well on it.
- inopinatus 3y agoOn the one hand, sure, it’s a kinda like that Mission Accomplished xkcd. On the other hand, the parable of Frogstar World B warns against self-reinforcing focus on a local maxima at the expense of diversity. Fortunately I doubt we’re at risk of passing the Marketing Content Event Horizon just yet
- rrdharan 3y agoRe: Mission Accomplished, that's https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ and indeed it was the first thing that came to mind when reading GP's comment.
- jgimenez 3y agoBut how long until someone misreads this and understands a ChatGPT-based bot is what they need, to summarize news and spam HN continuously?
- idopmstuff 3y ago
- davidkunz 3y agoJust put "written in Rust" in the title, done.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hakanderyal 3y agoI don't see this post as "hacking" the HN, but in the same vein as the famous "Mission ... accomplished" comic from xkcd[0]. I wish more people produced content like the ones they've mentioned (about an interesting, current topic, with their own take). [0]: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- naveen99 3y agoI wonder when the llm’s will start communicating directly with each other using just embeddings. Our words will seem like dolphin squeaks in comparison.
- justaj 3y agoOn the flipside of this argument, it kind of sucks to submit an awesomely made article [0] which details significant research on the intricacies of DAW UI requirements and have almost no discussion on it because other posts may have been gamed and thus received attention instead of the more organically submitted content. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35922858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35922858
- archagon 3y agoSometimes, if an article is good enough, you can message dang to see if he might put it in the second chance pool. That article does look great — gave it an upvote if it helps.
- WA 3y agoOther posts weren’t gamed, but just more catered to this audience. Your example is extremely obvious: I don’t know what a DAW UI is and it isn’t explained in the first sentences of the page and I don’t really bother to put more time into finding out. It doesn’t matter how in-depth the article is if it doesn’t resonate at all with most average HN users.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoTrue, people often assume everyone knows their acronyms ...
- skilled 3y agoHN as a whole is a very hackable hivemind if you can bare the opinions. Everything else is just news.
- junofan 3y ago“What we learned writing our backend in Rust”
- that_guy_iain 3y agoHonestly, having had my articles on the front page of HN a few times. It’s cool but doesn’t really change anything and honestly compared to other sources such as some Reddit subreddits it’s smaller and shorter. But you do get a ton of back links so that makes for go SEO(?)
- yodon 3y agoWill you let us subscribe to your newsbot? Feel free to put a delay on it so you don't get jumped.
- carabiner 3y agoSpoiler: headline is clickbait and article is a bunch of HN reader flattery, so naturally it gets upvoted. It is not a critical look at exploiting HN algorithm or audience, it just tells people what they want to hear on a lazy Saturday.
- lasfter 3y agoSo it's not clickbait, right? This is how they hack HN!
- richardatlarge 3y agoLazy Sunday in NZ :)
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y agoI don't think there can be much better praise for a site's moderation approach than someone deciding that creating relevant, high-quality content is the best way to "beat" the algorithm/approach. And someone doing that has certainly earned the right to include "one sentence that is the least salesy you can do" of self-promotion.
- ramraj07 3y agoYeah HN is weirdly still amazing at filtering the good stuff. I have submitted things here only when I truly felt it added value and I had something to say, and never bothered to think about anything to optimize. Yet I actually got at least some traction every single time. It’s quite amazing. I noticed these guys coming in the front page very often too, and while I agree their “hack” seems laudable while also not offending anyone (they’re doing what we are looking for), they seem to forget one more reason why they keep getting traction - the product they sell is absolutely on target to HN audience at an emotional level so people likely upvote due to that reason as well.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago> I noticed these guys coming in the front page very often too.... Is less than once a month "very often?" Or do you mean "very often relative to how frequently one would expect a company that makes an alternative to Google Analytics" would make the front page? I did think it was hilarious that they posted an article showing how to get to the front page of HN in such a way that you can sneak in a quick mention of your product without tripping the community's anti-self promotion bias, while literally did the exact thing they were suggesting doing.
- irrational 3y agoWhile reading, I kept asking myself why someone would care about getting to the front page of HN (saving up this fake points to get something good?) until I reached: > Step 3: The secret sauce We always end with a section that is called: Final thoughts. This is your moment to shine and drop a punchline that talks about your product/service. And, there it is.
- jamestimmins 3y agoThis isn't exactly a secret. Everyone who puts their own content on HN is hoping to get something from it, including companies who often put out high-value content (fly.io comes to mind).
- burnished 3y agoTailscale is a perfect example, I only know they exist because their engineering blog gets shared (and I quite like their break downs)
- baobabKoodaa 3y agoWell, some people just like to be internet famous, without selling you a product.
- gavinhoward 3y agoI'm a blogger, and I often want to get on the front page of HN, even for posts that are not shilling anything. It helps get my name in front of people (since my username is my real, legal name). This is a long-term strategy; I am building a business, and the more people that know my name when I start announcing things, the better. Yeah, I have an ulterior motive too, but I'm okay with it if that motive drives me to do actually good things.
- rpeden 3y agoIsn't this part of content marketing 101, though? I've bounced back and forth between engineering and DevRel over the years and whenever I create this kind of content I'm careful to provide the interesting and valuable part up front. And I try to make the pitch at the end gentle and easy to skip or ignore if that's what the reader wants. I never want someone to feel like they were tricked into reading a sales pitch. I see this as one way of trying to stem the tide of shitty articles and blog posts that have been proliferating for the past couple of decades and are kicking into overdrive now. Companies should also consider, on the other hand, that writing interesting things and then not making a pitch at the end can be even more valuable. This kind of content is becoming very rare because it takes time to deliver impact, and that impact is hard to measure. I think that's why creating great content without a concluding product plug is the ultimate mic drop in an era where many marketers are running scared and dropping easy-to-measure milquetoast bunt singles because execs mention 'operational efficiency' twenty-seven times during every all-hands meeting. To be clear, I'm not advocating inefficiency; I'm just saying thoughtful posts that don't immediately and directly shove a percentage of readers into your funnel might be the current Moneyball of marketing to engineers.
- imoverclocked 3y agoThis one simple trick HN’ers don’t want you to know: Put ChatGPT, RaspberryPI, Apple or Rust into the title.
- avinassh 3y agoyou missed Postgres
- trhr 3y agoI don't click on any "newsworthy" articles here. I just don't care enough. I'm here for the how-tos and look-what-i-founds.
- mooreds 3y agoGood read. I would love if they'd taken the next step and told us how the extra traffic and SEO links had helped the business. I mean, that's the ultimate goal, and Hacker News doesn't pay the bills: https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2017-03-13-hacker-news-doesnt-pay-the-bills https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2017-03-13-hacker-news-do... The tl;dr of the article is: provide value to the HN audience by highlighting articles of interest, possibly adding some extra commentary, and you'll get karma points. No gaming, no telling folks "vote for my post". Kinda seems like the system is working! From my perspective, I do post self-promotional links, but keep them to 5-10% of my posts (don't really keep track, that's more of a 'look at the last 30 posts and see if I have 2-3 self-posts'). Keep the self-promotional stuff quality, and you have to share other posts too. (I got a warning when I posted less than high-quality links and took it to heart. The mods are definitely watching.) In fact, one of my joys is finding an interesting article from someone else and having it 'hit' on HN. It's such a gift to all the writers out there who are screaming into the void. It doesn't always lead to something, but it sure is fun to have folks reach out and thank me for the HN spike. Plus the HN crowd gets exposed to the quality ideas. As I said, the system is working.
- teekert 3y agoWhat gets measured gets done. The HN+community system appears to accurately measure value to its community. Of course we all knew that.
- furyofantares 3y agoAnother trick, not mentioned, but demonstrated, is pandering.
- mkl95 3y agoI have hit the front page 5 or 6 times just by sharing content I find genuinely interesting. HN users have a sixth sense that detects organic links vs automated stuff.
- andreyk 3y agoThis article is great insofar as it describes how to write an article that appeals to HN. But having been writing and submitting to HN for like 8 years with maybe a dozen front page entries, I think the hack is simpler: pick a topic people want to discuss/find interesting, name the article well (not clickbaity but not boring), and submit earlyish in the day PST. The content of the article is not super important for hitting the front page (as evidenced by a lot of the stuff that does hit front page). BUT if you want to stay on the front page/rank higher, I suspect article quality does matter a lot.
- 0x5345414e 3y agoThis is a bit like saying you cheat on tests by studying…
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- edandersen 3y agoRepeatedly submitting the same domain from the same account gets a penalty. How did they work around that? Sock puppet accounts and voting rings?
- jgimenez 3y agoMost likely they did that a bunch of times only, and with good content each time
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- YY-EN40P 3y agoAs an English non-native, I can't reproduce the way to create an article in 1-2 hours. Can you guys do it easily? Anyway, their strategy is one of the popular ways of content marketing. But each step has something new in detail. Good takeaways!
- theGnuMe 3y agoI think there are a few ways to make this scale using chatgpt and perhaps a human to review/edit rather than write.
- YY-EN40P 3y ago>To be relevant for HN, you can’t just copy/paste the news item. Yeah, some parts are perhaps copied/pasted. As you say, their tips include the way to shorten the time of creating an article. That should be the reason they expressed not "write an article" but "create an article".
- tayo42 3y agoYeah, they're professionals, they churn out content constantly. I'm willing to bet that you can write 500-1000 words in your native language in the same time about any topic. You can hop onto a lot of freelance sites and find writers that will write under 1000 words for not much.
- SergeAx 3y ago> we drop everything and start investigating the news item I suspected that "indie hackers" are mostly hacking their customers, not their code. Here's a good data point in favor of my theory.
- j3s 3y agofeels like an AI generated article, has a ton of listicle-like content. has a ton of references to paid software. just gonna ignore this one
- mattwilsonn888 3y agoTLDR: 1. Be the guy that posts the news articles 2. Try the same post multiple times if it doesn't 'make it' 3. Timing is important - weekends are good opportunities.
- tayo42 3y agoBasically how Twitter works with a bit more effort. Find hot topics and post throwaway takes about them.
- pictur 3y agoHN is a site with a group of geeks who, as its user base, mostly think the same way. That's why this tactic works.
- whinvik 3y agoIt may be a poor analogy but they seem to be doing what marketmakers in the HFT world do for HN up votes!
- Veen 3y agoAn alternative title might be "How Hacker News forces marketers to write better content".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]