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This is a good rundown but misses the biggest thing, random chance. Depending on time of day the your post will stay on page one of "new" for between 20-40 min
by samwillis 3y ago
This is a good rundown but misses the biggest thing, random chance.
Depending on time of day the your post will stay on page one of "new" for between 20-40 minutes. It needs about 4-6 upvotes in that time to drop onto the bottom of the homepage, and then with that a chance of more eyeballs. Some people skim page two and look for thing with a couple of votes for closer inspection, but the reality is you have that brief moment to catch attention of people who are interested in your topic.
The more high profile the item you're posting is the more likely it will catch the attention of people who are interested in the short window. More obscure topics are obviously harder to catch those initial votes.
The new page is very busy at some particular times of day. It can be a good idea to post more obscure topics in a "down time" period.
2-6pm UTC is by far the busiest time, you often see corporate posts aiming to land in new during this time, even to the point of scheduling their blog posts for this window. The payoff in traffic is worth the chance of a very brief period on page one of new.
The other thing to note is that HN is a different place at the weekend, interesting long reads do well then along with somewhat fun and silly side projects.
Also consider "Show HN" posts, they have a different ranking "gravity" and can be easer to get into the homepage, but don't necessarily stay there or as high for as long. If you are launching something, this is your best bet. They also hang around on the "show" page for days with a log tail of traffic.
Finally there is the "second chance pool" [0], I don't know the details of who or how, but some posts are flagged to be given a second chance on the bottom of the homepage. Sometimes hours or days later. A surprising proportion of top of homepage posts come from that pool - good things have a high chance of entering it.
Best advise, write what you're interested in and keep posting.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
- eatonphil 3y agoWow, while I knew about the pool, I didn't know there was a page that actually showed it.
- pyeri 3y agoExactly! There is no link on the main hn page to this pool, how are we supposed to visit there? And if nobody visits, what's even the use of having this pool! Who knows what other hidden nuggets these chosen few Illuminati are hiding!
- eatonphil 3y agoThat's not how it works exactly. It's just that this pool page is a list of all the pages that have been submitted back to the second chance pool by the mods.
- antognini 3y agoAs I understand it the way it works is that items from the pool are randomly put on the front page for some fraction of users so you don't have to directly visit the pool page.
- redbell 3y ago> There is no link on the main hn page to this pool In fact, there is one! But it is somehow, hidden. In the front page scroll to the bottom and you will find some footnotes in the form of links, click the “lists” item and it will take you to another page, choose the second item “pool” and you are there!
- josters 3y agoOn that note, here[1] is a resource with some more undocumented HN features. [1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
- morkalork 3y agoThe second chance pool is a pretty good example of just how mercilessly random getting on the front page is. Lots of cool and interesting stuff just slips by and gets drowned out the first time it's submitted.
- antognini 3y agoI had a blog post last year that made it to the top of HN thanks to the second chance pool. I submitted the post to HN on a Saturday and it got I think two upvotes before slipping off of "new" and I figured that was the end of that. But to my surprise I happened to check HN Sunday evening and found that it was near the top. I had no idea that something like that was possible.
- linux2647 3y agoCase in point: TFA was submitted five days ago[0] and barely got any upvotes. Now this second submission has over 100 upvotes and made the front page [0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Frandomshit.dev%2Fposts%2Fwhat-gets-to-the-front-page-of-hacker-news https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Frandomshit.dev%2Fpos...
- samwillis 3y agoOh, thought of another important one to add. HN post titles have to (mostly) match the title of the page/article. Think carefully how you title your posts so that they are descriptive enough about the post. Short titles, like "why we are awesome", with no lead or indication of topic do very badly. For GitHub repositories, include a description of the tool along with the name of it in the readme title. Your page title is your HN post title.