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Should you submit to Hacker News?
- recoiledsnake 13y agoGreat post and analysis. I've been guilty of the delete/submit trick in rare cases where I believe the story is of interest to HN ;) Thanks for the MySql dump and the Python code. Any way you can provide the parsing code as well?
- dottrap 13y agoHmmm, this went up at about 7pm on Sat. Should have waited a couple of hours and maybe until the next day ;)
- mayank 13y agoTechnically, yes :) But I had a beer waiting for me at a bar...
- antjanus 13y agoAwesome summary. I always wonder if anyone actually took the time to do this.
- pg 13y agoIt's slightly inaccurate to describe deleting and resubmitting as a loophole, because we ban people who do this.
- minimaxir 13y agoI've noticed people doing that (on days where I check new frequently), so I've been curious if that's addressed. It's good to know that it is. :) The annoying thing about that tactic is that there's plausible deniability for the perpetrator to nonadmins. Well, unless someone is using a Python scraper, anyways.
- pyre 13y agoYou're not limited with a Python scraper. Just scrape the comments url, and pull out the id number. That's unique, even if the story url and title aren't.
- lqdc13 13y agoThe main problem with this analysis is that the time on the /newest is not useful without knowing how many users saw it. Maybe staying up for 5 minutes on a Tuesday afternoon is better than an hour on Saturday night.
- tikhonj 13y agoI assume the main goal is to get onto the front page rather than just maximize views on the /newest page. I am willing to bet that getting on the front page at the least active time is still far better than being on the new page at the busiest time.
- honzzz 13y agoIf I understand correctly, the determining factor is not the time spent on 'new' page but the number of upvotes. During less busy hours submissions spend more time on the 'new' page but are seen by less people per unit of time and therefore get less upvotes per unit of time. The time itself means nothing. It's about ratio of time on new page to upvotes per unit of time which might be higher during busy hours. That means that it's not impossible that the correlation between time spent on new page and probability of getting to main page is negative.
- jordn 13y agoHowever, to get on to the front page all that is required is that your 'hotness' score (approximately votes/time) is better than most of the competing stories. More time on 'newest' -> fewer stories posted. The 'hotness' requirement is lower. It's also likely that as no major press releases are made during the off-times that the competition is lower quality. Less popular posts that might not make it during the week have a better chance of making it. Now, on a Sunday morning, the top three stories have about 20 upvotes each.
- donebizkit 13y agoI submitted my side project last Tuesday @6am and it drowned within 10 min. I found a better exposure when I submitted to ASK HN instead. It would be great if we get the same analysis on the "ask" page. Thanks mayank for sharing your work.
- glitch273 13y agoIs there a separate submit page for Ask HN? or do you just prefix your post with that title?
- jameswyse 13y agoIt's the same submit page, just leave 'url' blank and write your post content in the 'text' box. The title can be whatever you want, though the common prefixes are helpful.
- Udo 13y agoLooking at the ask tab, this is actually somewhat of a loophole people are using inappropriately. Prime examples on the ask page right now that have absolutely no business being there: Ask HN: Invest in Adam | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688027 Show HN: Elevatr | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5690920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5690920 A beautiful self hosted alternative to Basecamp | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5687765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5687765 Ask HN: Why was the MeteorAtSO twitter account suspended? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5686579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5686579 A lot of these are actually Show HNs exploiting the longer lifetime of Ask HN posts. That said, I like Show HN projects. Having a separate tab for "Show HN" (similar to Ask) would be nice, giving those projects more exposure.
- wikiburner 13y agoAre you sure you're not allowed to post Show HNs through the Ask HN form? I'm finishing up a project that I'd like to post as a Show HN, and I was actually just about to post an Ask HN to find out if I should post my Show HN as a link or an Ask HN (I feel like I'm in Inception - We need to go deeper!!!) It seems to me that it has more to do with tradeoffs than an actual policy against it. Ask HNs are much less likely to be ignored outright, and they linger on the Ask HN page, which is great. However, they tend to drop off the front page much more quickly than a link submitted with a url and no text. I've never seen officially stated rules on how to submit Show HNs, so let me know if you've seen something different.
- tyre 13y agoThis doesn't seem like very meaningful data. So you want to stay on /newest for the longest amount of time? Submit Sunday night. Well I would venture not a lot of people read HN on Sunday nights, so what is the purpose of hanging around their? The best trick I've seen to staying on the homepage is writing about interesting things, making novel points, or providing insight to currently relevant material.
- alok-g 13y agoExcept that many a times (may I say most of the times actually), things that are good are still lost without being noticed. A clear proof comes from someone submitting something that does not get anywhere followed by someone else submitting nominally the same URL and making it to the front page.
- JeremyMorgan 13y agoI too often see better results when my submissions are in /new/ longer, but when you do get a "hit" article during the day to hit the front page it gets a lot more eyes. As far the delete-resubmit thing, I don't see that a lot, and I highly doubt it works on a site as technically centered as this one is. Sounds like a great way to get banned.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoLook the best time to submit a article or idea is when you are ready to share the thought. If you are relying on extra time on HN front page as your marketing strategy you have other problems. If evenings in California is over-represented that's pg's problem as he tries to grow HN. Reading this I was tempted for a micro-second to write some script that will submit when I am asleep - but then I realised if I did that, so would everyone else and I would have nothing interesting to read when awake. Now that really would be a tragedy.
- JeremyMorgan 13y agoI agree with this 100%. I share stuff from my website and stuff from a lot of other websites, and I notice when something does well or flops, but since I have no real vested interest in it, I don't care and don't want to let upvotes dictate what I share. If I think the HN crowd will like it, and they don't that's fine, move on. I'm sure those trying to sell something see it quite differently.
- lowboy 13y agoThe best time to submit is subject to the goals of the poster, not simply when they are ready to share the thought. If that's your goal, then great.
- wfunction 13y ago> Hacker News does not allow submissions to be downvoted. I thought it does?
- argonaut 13y agoYou can only flag submissions. Flagging is meant to be reserved for spam or other egregious violations, as far as I know, though the "rules" on HN are not hard and fast. I'll sometimes flag really egregiously link-baity submissions.
- wfunction 13y agoHmm... how do posts die then? By flagging?
- saraid216 13y agoPosts don't need upvotes to live, and don't need downvotes to die. I imagine there's some ranking done based on the number of upvotes or comments in the last X period against the amount of time it's been up at all.
- ehsanu1 13y agoAFAIK the site itself, and mods (unknown who they are besides pg really) kill posts at their own whim. Flagging is one signal for that. Of course, you can just wait for the passage of time, which will "kill" any post on the front page eventually.
- wfunction 13y agoI'm pretty sure I've seen posts pretty much Dead On Arrival though... I don't think the mods are monitoring the Newest page 24/7?
- itafroma 13y agopg has mentioned[1] that there are certain banned sites: if a submitted story is from one of them, presumably it is killed immediately automatically. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5502382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5502382
- clamprecht 13y agoNice analysis. I would love to see an analysis of the title changing behavior. E.g., the original title, and the title after being edited by the mods. (Sometimes this happens more than once). In fact, I think I've observed mods apparently fighting (with each other) over the title.
- mayank 13y agoYou should be able to examine that by looking at the MySQL data dump. I save titles as they appear on /newest, indexed by href, so you should be able to see title editing in action.
- Saavedro 13y agoA while back I put together a doodad to collect and plot this sort of data over reddit (both as a whole and at a subreddit level), see http://reddalyzr.com/#/all http://reddalyzr.com/#/all The banner is there as I built it as a demo/dogfooding app. Right now it only has a few days worth of data in it as the database backing it got blown up earlier this week.
- jabbernotty 13y agoOff topic: The <div id="content"> has a fixed width, a left:50% and a margin-left:50%, making it difficult to read on smaller screens. In my case, that is my screen divided in half. It is also difficult to adjust with dev tools (I sometimes have to do this for readability). ( The post is something I'm very interested in, but I haven't had time to read it yet :P )
- petercooper 13y agoI think a real problem is not enough emphasis is put on newest. I suspect not that many people (relative to the active user base) look at it frequently, so people end up "encouraging" others to vote up their posts, etc. It'd be cool if there was a way to encourage people to be exposed to these posts more (I use the firehose account on Twitter which helps a little, but not much.)
- fmavituna 13y agoThere is a better tactic, submit the same page with different random querystring params. Means, unlimited amount of submissions. Frequently used as well. http://example.com/page/ http://example.com/page/ http://example.com/page/?1 http://example.com/page/?1 http://example.com/page/?2 http://example.com/page/?2 http://example.com/page/?3 http://example.com/page/?3 ...
- JacksonGariety 13y agoUntil you get banned, yeah.
- fmavituna 13y agoI've seen it's used by the top karma users, so doubt it.
- MasterScrat 13y agoBuffer (http://bufferapp.com/ http://bufferapp.com/) should do this to know what's the best times to post your stories. They could get great insights as they're gathering data from a multitude of social platforms and users.
- rcfox 13y agoFor those confused about why you would want to optimize the amount of time on the /newest page: I believe it comes from a comment that pg(?) made at some point that once an article falls off the first page of /newest, it's pretty much impossible to get on to the front page. I'm not sure if that's part of the algorithm, or just an observation he was making though. So, spending more time on /newest means that you have more opportunity to make it on to the front page.
- andrewcooke 13y agoone problem is, though, that what people like here may not match what you want people to read. it's easier to get a rant on the front page than some more interesting, but technical, article...
- wes-k 13y agoLooks like he posted this around 9pm Saturday night. Glad to see he is using his own findings.