
Ask HN: Am I producing low quality links? - Raed667
I try to blog once a month in average. And I almost always share the links on HN.<p>And even though with every post, a decent amount of traffic is generated, most of the time there is no feed-back or any kind of interaction in the comments&#x2F;votes.<p>Am I doing something wrong, like posting in wrong times, about subjects that don&#x27;t interest this community?<p>Or is my writing style not that interesting&#x2F;engaging?
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mbrock
From your blog:

> _I have received some criticism lately about the way I title my blog posts.
> And I got accused of clickbaiting the readers in order to get more views.
> But you have to understand now that with social media , writers have to get
> interested in a story in just 60 characters and a picture while you’re
> scrolling. In fact you have to get you interested enough to stop scrolling,
> click the link and read a portion of the content._

That stuff might work for BuzzFeed and ClickHole but HN is shock full of weary
intelligent people who come to the site to _get away_ from all that nonsense.

They probably feel condescended to by the type of headline and post created
with the idea that "the quality of the post doesn’t really matter, what
resides is the message of the title" and they will run at the faintest whiff
of such a cynical approach.

> _We were not all born as evil clickbaiters it is just that you readers won’t
> click on anything else, and if my articles stop getting hits (even though I
> don’t use any Ads network) I will stop writing for lack of interest._

HN people can tell. If you instead write about stuff you really care about,
they will tell that you are genuinely trying to participate in the community,
and then even if they don't think your stuff is most amazing stuff ever you
will probably get more community response and comments.

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rtl49
I read one of your posts, the one on security challenges facing IoT devices.
It just didn't seem to have been informed by a difficult technical challenge
for which you had created a novel solution. Just a small amount of advice
that, truthfully, I think would have been obvious to anyone working in this
space.

I'm inclined to believe that blogging with the intention of attracting
attention is more likely to embarrass than earn you professional credibility.
If you happen to have some truly original thought, or you've discovered
something interesting that someone might benefit from learning, or even if
you've just organized a collection of useful technical information that had
previously been scattered across multiple sites, _then_ write a blog post.
Otherwise it's just one of a billion other walls of text written to directly
or indirectly make money, which nobody whose attention is valuable has time
for.

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fundamental
It sure looks that way by skimming your past submissions which trace back to
your site. Most of them look like brief summaries of something which has been
already said in numerous other locations.

Additionally any post title in the format of "# ways/reasons/tips for X" is
generally a solid indicator that the content is low quality IMO.

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ColinWright
Is the material new? Is it novel? Is it unusual? Is it technical? Is it
something you've done, or are you just thinking out loud?

What time of day are you posting? Do you check how long things are staying on
the "newest" page? Have you checked whether anything on the newest page has
got votes?

Have you done any analysis at all?

Let us know what you've done. Perhaps you could do a deep analysis of time-of-
day-of-posting versus number of hits on your site, then blog in-depth about
the results, and submit that.

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detaro
EDIT: after seeing /u/mbrock's comment: fully agreed to that, he picked out
very well what I couldn't put in words.

There certainly is a lot of chance with what gets picked up and what not ->
often enough you see a link go nowhere, someone posts the same 2 hours later
and it goes up the front page.

That said, I agree with /u/fundamental, and I guess many people don't even
click on headlines like that, because the chance that there is something high-
quality behind them is slim. Looking at the first page of your submission
history, there are quite a few that follow this pattern. For others the title
doesn't, but the content is similarly very shallow.

The few articles that seemed interesting to me:

"Privacy conscious Two-factor authentication": might get interesting
discussion, maybe resubmit as a "Show HN:"

"Hack your way to presidency": headline doesn't really give context, not sure
if relevant right now (it was 2014, what came out of it later? _THAT_ might be
an interesting analysis)

"When Engineering fails": Again, headline doesn't describe the content
properly (and if people expected something else they IMHO are less likely to
comment).

Look at the blog posts that get very high on HN and are not announcements of
some product etc. and compare.

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DrScump
For me, seeing that each page hits GoogleAnalytics and Gravitar and
DoubleClick turns me away immediately.

