
When to post to Hacker News and how many points to make it to the front page - readcodelearn
http://readcodelearn.com/notes/when-to-post-to-hn.html
======
minimaxir
As someone who has looked into this area for Reddit and HN data, here are a
few additional notes before everyone starts submitting their blog posts and
marketing pieces to HN on weekday mornings:

1) After everything, the analysis is probabilistic. You are not guaranteed to
get onto the front page just by submitting on at a high-probability time.

2) There are game-theoric implications; the more people submitting at a time
(weekday mornings), the less likely people will see your post on /new before
it is pushed off the first page, and it is highly unlikely to get upvotes once
it has fallen off the top 30 slots. (hence the repost/second chance rules)

3) For obvious reasons, don't submit if there is important news occuring.
(e.g. Apple/Google/Microsoft event)

4) Above all, if your submission does not get any upvotes, don't interpret it
as your post being low quality. The median score of all submissions is 1-2
points regardless of time submitted.
([http://i.imgur.com/SN5BuAJ.png](http://i.imgur.com/SN5BuAJ.png))

The OP is impressively throrough regardless, especially since working with
ranking data-over-time is much better than working with raw data.

~~~
sillysaurus3
The way to get onto the front page is to gratify your own curiosity, and then
tell people about it. This article, for example.

~~~
minimaxir
To paraphrase the original article that inspired the OP, the Hacker News front
page is not a meritocracy. There _are_ optimizations that make your submission
more likely to be upvoted (a simple one being a clickbait title). It is worth
noting that this submission would have different behavior with the original
title "You only need 3 votes to play, and other facts about the Hacker News
frontpage." (and apparently it was just changed to that, and penalized?)

That's also why a good moderation team is necessary and important; to fix
submissions which are not inherently good, and to boost submissions which are
not inherently bad.

~~~
madeofpalk
Also, your post will get weighted down if it contains certain words or is from
a certain domain. I believe at one point 'NSA' got you penalised (due to the
high number of NSA links coming in at one point in time), and Medium posts
have a tougher time getting onto the front page (due to the lower signal:noise
ratio I guess).

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_from a certain domain_

There's more than a bit of leftist elitism at work. E.g. I once made the
mistake of submitting something from breitbart.com. It never appeared in
'new'.

When I'm logged in, it shows me that I've submitted 5 items. Examining my
submissions anonymously only shows 4 items. Perhaps there are 5 if someone has
'showdead' on?

Putin's external propaganda site, rt.com, is OK, heaven forbid that Breitbart
be afforded that same privilege.

~~~
madeofpalk
I think the simpler reason is for a similar reasons as to why Medium get's
penalised by the algo - links from Breitbart (and Medium) generate less useful
discussions than other sites, thus they must 'work harder' to 'earn' their
place on the front page.

Similar to the 'flame war detection' that flags posts with more comments than
(up)votes.

------
robertelder
Something that I've found to be very important in determining whether a
submission is successful (here on HN and on reddit) is the first comment. If
something has a handful of upvotes, people will often check the comments to
see if the link is worth their time or not. If the first comment is "Wow, this
is amazing! Why is this not on the front page?" you have a much better chance
of making it than if the first comment is "This is blogspam. Move along." Once
a post gets critical mass, and there is a conversation going on, people assume
that the post is worth reading, and invest more time, which creates more
upvotes. Of course, this isn't the best filtering mechanism since it is
effectively the wisdom of the crowds.

------
sohkamyung
Is there a breakdown based on the rough IP location of the people who submits
articles?

I suspect that HN is also biased towards users in the western hemisphere; so
much so that when people from East Asia (like me) post or comment, it is
comparatively harder to accumulate points as our posting time is out of sync
with when the majority of HN users will see them.

I suppose one way out of this is to post when my local time is past midnight
but I haven't reached the point where I value my HN points that highly
compared to daily life...<grin>.

~~~
Gustomaximus
[http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com)

[https://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=hacker%20news](https://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=hacker%20news)

Not sure how accurate Alexa is. Generally between India, China, Australia and
Indonesia they must pull a fair size audience.

------
forrestthewoods
HN is frustrating. I've had two blog posts hit #1 in r/programming recently.
Neither got more than 2 points on HN.

I could be wrong but I _think_ HN is more random than Reddit. Reddit has lots
of randomness of course. But my gut says that escaping New on HN is harder and
less predictable.

~~~
sillysaurus3
So submit them again, if they're interesting. That's both allowed and
encouraged here.

Use your judgement though. It's a privilege to be able to do this. Three times
over the course of a few days is probably fine. Four is probably too many.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Is it? I thought re-submission is frowned upon.

I've also gotten "slow down, you're submitting too fast" when multiple days
have passed. That might have been because I'd had a few comments get a bunch
of downvotes? I comment a lot but almost never submit stories.

~~~
sillysaurus3
If the HN front page consisted of your content alone, I would be very happy.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=forrestthewoods](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=forrestthewoods)

[https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/reverse-engineering-
sublime...](https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/reverse-engineering-sublime-text-
s-fuzzy-match-4cffeed33fdb#.ovs3w0fqv)

[https://gamedevdaily.io/four-ways-to-create-a-mesh-for-a-
sph...](https://gamedevdaily.io/four-ways-to-create-a-mesh-for-a-
sphere-d7956b825db4?gi=7b9c7b2c0996#.5lzblag34)

[https://gamedevdaily.io/advanced-behavior-tree-
structures-4b...](https://gamedevdaily.io/advanced-behavior-tree-
structures-4b9dc0516f92#.95kzyvwwh)

Speaking purely for myself, I hope to see them resubmitted. The post about
reverse engineering Sublime's fuzzy matching algorithm is an overlooked gem, I
think.

~~~
mintplant
I liked that one, too. Resubmitted it here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11515800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11515800)

~~~
sillysaurus3
Submissions need to be a bit more organic. :)

I like that it disappeared from the front page, or never showed up, because it
means HN's voting ring detector is working very well. Kind of amusing.

I'm sure it'll pop up sometime, though.

~~~
forrestthewoods
And here I thought some of my content would see the front page.

How disappointing. :(

~~~
sdegutis
My solution has been:

(1) stop posting stuff anywhere

(2) stop going on the internet except for doing my job

It's raised my productivity and contentment a lot.

(Well, sometimes I break rule #1 to make comments like this. But that's about
it.)

Only thing left to solve is
[http://i.imgur.com/95NZpPy.png](http://i.imgur.com/95NZpPy.png) and then I'll
really be living the life.

------
moonlighter
Q: Where’s the safest place to hide a body?

A: Page 2 of Hacker News.

~~~
jabrams2
[http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/) and other sites provide an
alternative view of HN posts to combat this issue.

------
EGreg
My early submissions to HN all hit the front page and were upvoted quite a
bit, sometimes reaching #2 overall. But in the past couple years, _nothing_ I
submit _ever_ hits the front page, even if it gets more points initially than
the submissions before. Not only that, it doesn't appear even on pages 2-20. I
wonder if there is a way to check if I'm being suppressed somehow as a
contributor on HN.

Source: see my past submissions.

~~~
minimaxir
Note that the ranking algorithm has changed over time; which is why it's a
good thing the OP's analysis is limited to a year.

------
q_revert
I've only made two submissions. By some odd coincidence both made it to #1,
which has scared me off making any further submissions for fear of ruining my
perfect score! :D

------
PaulHoule
(i.e. aim for Europe, catch fire on the East Coast, then you are set up for
the win on the West Coast)

------
Chris2048
I wish there was post notification on HN :-/

I also think that people _shouldn 't_ post small projects that don't belong to
them - If a project/site author wants to be on HN, send them an email and
suggest it. They should pick their "release" date, and be prepared for HN
traffic.

------
jakegarelick
Has anyone had their submission automatically re-posted?

My most upvoted submission was posted on a weekday night - the timestamp
changed in the morning then it got several hundred upvotes.

~~~
jsnell
Yes, that is the moderators manually resurfacing good content that got no
attention the first time. See for example:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313525)

~~~
dang
Yes. For more info, see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926)
and the other links there.

~~~
jsnell
Thanks, that's a better source than any I'd seen before. Have you thought
about mentioning this in the FAQ? It seems to come up pretty often, and can be
kind of confusing due to the timestamp manipulation.

~~~
dang
We will eventually, but the experiments haven't stabilized yet. There are
still one or two major ideas we have yet to try.

------
Artemis2
Is the time zone for your measurements Pacific Time?

~~~
readcodelearn
Ah sorry, it should be EST, updated the article to say that :)

~~~
fredley
Great stuff, but please normalise to UTC in future. Everyone (reading this)
knows their own offset from UTC and can probably makes sense of the data
directly in that format. For anything else I have to go and lookup the offset
between that timezone and mine.

~~~
jmiserez
(Disclaimer: I'm in Europe)

For a website with a US centric audience, I think it makes perfect sense to
use a US timezone: The graphs match up well with the sleep/wake patterns in
the EST timezone. This makes interpreting the data a bit easier, i.e you can
easily tell that there is a morning rush, a lunch rush, etc. (although
interestingly, the HN audience doesn't seem to have well-defined break hours
as there is just one large peak per day).

~~~
Artemis2
> The graphs match up well with the sleep/wake patterns in the EST

I'd expect them to match more PST/PDT (-4h), that's where the Silicon Valley
and YCombinator are.

------
qrv3w
I was just searching this exact thing last week, and couldn't find any
analysis. This is a terrific, thanks!

------
anotherevan
The surest way to make the front page of Hacker News is to write an article
about Hacker News.

------
cgtyoder
Very meta

------
totony
Just bot it to front page

~~~
minimaxir
The voting ring detector has worked pretty well in my observations of posts in
/new with unexpected amounts of karma.

