

Tell HN: Show HN has become an awful way to introduce your project - twa927

Look at the numbers of points the stories get - it&#x27;s usually 1-5 points, and I bet most of it are upvotes from owners&#x2F;friends.<p>The exposure is very low: a &quot;Show HN&quot; that doesn&#x27;t reach the front page receives as low as 10-20 visits.<p>Some time ago a separate &quot;show&quot; section was introduced on HN, a sign that HN admins appreciate &quot;Show HN&quot; posts. But it doesn&#x27;t work.<p>I think a step should be taken in either of two directions:<p>1. Even more attention should be directed towards &quot;Show HN&quot;s. Maybe they should stay longer on the first page of &quot;new&quot;?<p>2. &quot;Show HN&quot; shouldn&#x27;t be a place to introduce startups and other &quot;real world&quot; projects. Let&#x27;s face it, a typical HN user is a programmer wanting to read something technical (with occasional politics&#x2F;science stuff interesting for &quot;geeks&quot;). He will not take time to understand&#x2F;appreciate your non-technical startup. What you can get at most is a snarky comment, but almost all will just ignore it.<p>For 2. to happen it requires mostly a change in what people think about &quot;Show HN&quot; (I feel many have much too big expectations - it&#x27;s highly unlikely that you will acquire valuable customers through a Show HN!), and maybe disabling the &quot;show&quot; section would also help.<p>I&#x27;m proposing this because I see some people losing their minds over inability to get exposure using &quot;Show HN&quot;.
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sjs382
I disagree.

When I re-launched Artpacks.org at the end of January, I did so with a Show
HN. I stayed at the top of the ShowHN page for most of the day, and was in the
top 5 on the home page for much of the day, too. For the day I launched, and
one day after, I received 4.5k uniques, about 80k pageviews, and had 90-120
concurrent users through a large part of the day.

When I launched SendToMyCloud.com a week later, I barely touched the front
page, and had about 1/3 that traffic. I attribute a lot of that to the type of
site (content vs app) and the amount of free content. I did get lots of
signups via HN, despite the fact that HN users didn't fit my target
demographic.

In both of these cases, after the initial surge was over and the sites were
off the front page, the project got a lot of long-tail traffic coming from
/show.

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camhenlin
I disagree, I've had a couple successful posts in Show HN that I was able to
garner some really useful feedback off of. I think the key is that people have
a short attention span so posting to show HN needs:

1\. A moderately interesting post title 2\. A direct link to a page that
immediately comes out and easily comes out and says what the thing does and
shows it off

Anything other than that seems to not do well or get negative comments, I
think that's ok.

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panorama
IMO there's a noise problem in Show HN, so I tend to avoid the section. Not
that people are building lousy projects (probably the opposite), but most
projects just aren't particularly relevant to me. When so many people are
submitting projects, I'd only ever be interested in maybe 1 project out of
every page.

Meanwhile in Ask HN, I click on about 5-10 links at any given time.

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chatmasta
Agreed lots of noise. But I still scan the Show HN page frequently for some
signal amongst the noise. I would be worried if the noise caused good show
HN's to be buried but j don't think that's the case. If anything,
consolidating noise and signal in one place makes it easier to find the
signal.

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percept
Much like the negativity thread, the will of a community reflects that of its
participants.

The more new projects are valued and encouraged by the community, the more
attention and benefit they'll receive. (Engineering only goes so far.)

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golem_de
2\. "Show HN" shouldn't be a place to introduce startups and other "real
world" projects.

Let's face it, a typical HN user is a programmer wanting to read something
technical.

He will not take time to understand/appreciate your non-technical startup.
What you can get at most is a snarky comment, but almost all will just ignore
it.

