

What's the best time of day/day of week to submit to HN? - joshuap

I'm wondering if anyone has noticed any trends regarding feedback and response to links/articles/questions submitted to HN. Completely selfish of course :).
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YuriNiyazov
I once ran a daemon that would hit the frontpage and the new page every 30
minutes over a period of two weeks to answer the exact question you are
asking. There weren't any statistically significant trends. Anecdotally,
submitting on Fridays is worse than submitting on Mondays.

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glimcat
"There weren't any statistically significant trends. Anecdotally, submitting
on Fridays is worse than submitting on Mondays."

Wait, what?

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joshuap
^ what he said :)

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YuriNiyazov
what?

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jackpirate
I figure that around noon in the US is the largest traffic, so you will spend
less time on the front page as more articles are submitted. But that time is
more valuable because more people will see it.

Conversely, if you post at midnight, you will get more time, but the time will
be less valuable. So in the end, I think it probably evens out to the same
number of users visiting an article.

The trick (not that I'm a big submitter) I would guess is to post things at
all hours. I imagine many people have a habbit of only cheching at a certain
time. Maybe it's their lunch break, maybe just before going to bed. By posting
things at all hours of the day, you can reach all of HN, rather than just the
subset that visits only at certain times.

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notatoad
from what i've seen, the traffic on HN seems to be low enough that everything
gets a pretty fair shake. things sit in the new queue long enough that no
matter when you submit it is going to get seen.

if your submissions aren't doing well, reconsider the content, not the timing
;)

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YuriNiyazov
Except when two submissions with different URLs but with same content perform
differently.

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jackpirate
Probably more a result of different submitters than different URLs?

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YuriNiyazov
1) I recognize that my one example is purely anecdotal, but this has happened
to me, and I was submitter on both.

2) Either way, even if the performance of a submission is a function of the
submitter rather than the URL, it contradicts what the GGP of this comment
said, which is that it is a function of content.

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jackpirate
re pt 1:

Do you think some URLs are more valuable (better domain/more descriptive/etc)?
Or was it just luck?

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YuriNiyazov
1) Better submission title (it was a pointer to a project I created, so I got
to choose the title) 2) better submission time.

