
Tell HN: If your HN submission doesn't get any upvotes, don't worry about it - minimaxir
I&#x27;ve recently been seeing many comments on Hacker News complaining that their submissions don&#x27;t receive any points. As a result, they believe that vote manipulation techniques such as begging friends for votes on social media and using sockpuppet accounts to counteract this injustice are justifiable and that &quot;everyone&#x27;s doing it&quot;. While blatant voting manipulation may be the status quo at a certain other startup-oriented link aggregator, it is never good because it breaks the integrity of the service.<p>However, the lack of upvotes is just how link aggregators work.<p>The goal of many HN posters is to hit the front page. If you&#x27;ve received 10 points, you&#x27;ll probably have hit the front page. However, depending on time of submission, you have a 10% to 20% chance of hitting 10 points: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;MdUvMB9.png<p>That&#x27;s low, even if your blog post or startup is the Next Big Thing.<p>However, what&#x27;s the typical behavior for HN submissions? Here&#x27;s a chart of the median points for HN submissions at each timeslot: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;SN5BuAJ.png<p>The median is either 1 (no upvotes) or 2 (just 1 upvote), which reinforces how the typical behavior of HN really is.<p>Yes, it&#x27;s possible for submissions to slip through the cracks. HN allows resubmission of links if they haven&#x27;t had any discussion (as long as you don&#x27;t delete-then-resubmit to obfuscate the fact that it&#x27;s a report). If your submission doesn&#x27;t get points, submit again later.<p>(Code and data for the two charts are available in this GitHub repository: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;minimaxir&#x2F;hn-heatmaps)
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austenallred
I think the problem is how easy it is to game HN, how effective it is to game
HN, and how random and spurious it is if you _don 't_ game HN.

It's _really_ difficult to just have your post get to the front page
organically. It's possible (and probable) that when you submit there just
aren't enough people looking at the /new page, so a lot of it comes down to
sheer luck. A lot of good/great posts go by unnoticed. Getting 1 or 2 friends
to upvote would probably increase your likelihood of being on the front page
by 90%.

I've been gravitating towards things like
[http://lpushx.com](http://lpushx.com), both because they're smaller, and
because everything has more of a chance to "survive."

Ironically, this post just exposes how helpful it is to do the behavior it
discourages. When you're trying to kill a lucrative behavior (especially
something that exposes a loophole), saying, "Please don't do this behavior" is
probably the worst way to do so. Now several people just figured out that you
_can_ game the system. I would recommend dang kill this.

~~~
andybak
This just occurred to me and I'm sure it's probably already been considered.

The home page should have display a sidebar or similar with the top 5 or so
'new' items. They then have a chance to catch someone's eye and get voted up
to the 'real' front page.

I'd love to spend more time on 'new' \- I just tend to forget about it.
Something that improved the visibility of new items would help me (..help HN)

~~~
jsnell
The average post in /newest is so bad that it's not clear you want to promote
any of them to the frontpage randomly. I'd guess on average on a 30 item page
of /newest I might click through two links, and upvote one.

I actually wonder if the stats in this post can possibly be correct. Never
would have guessed that anywhere near 10-20% of the submissions hit 10 points.
There's a lot of spam and offtopic stuff, and it is indeed really common for
great posts to get lost in the noise with just a couple of votes.

~~~
pavel_lishin
What about the first five posts from the 2nd page of /newest, with the added
addition that at least one newer than it must be dead (e.g., moderators have
at least looked at the queue)?

~~~
dang
[dead] stories are often, perhaps mostly, killed by software.

------
seiji
Great points. Non-submitters seldom realize how often new content goes ignored
around here. Unless you're one of the top 20 most recognized names here or
unless you're writing about fad-of-the-week, submissions are mostly ignored.

 _is never good because it breaks the integrity of the service._

vote manipulation is called _hustling_ these days. it tends to be okay if
you're in the blessed class allowed to manipulate people or are doing it for a
good cause (a private for-profit startup needing "exposure").

 _They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter._
[http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html)

------
minimaxir
Clickables:

10+ points chart:
[http://i.imgur.com/MdUvMB9.png](http://i.imgur.com/MdUvMB9.png)

Median chart: [http://i.imgur.com/SN5BuAJ.png](http://i.imgur.com/SN5BuAJ.png)

GitHub Repository: [https://github.com/minimaxir/hn-
heatmaps](https://github.com/minimaxir/hn-heatmaps)

------
hardwaresofton
I always try and 'remember to upvote'. So much great content goes through
here, I think many members forget to upvote things they thought were
interesting. I often forget to hit upvote on an article I clicked through to
and read/enjoyed.

Might lead to upvote inflation but I think extra positivity isn't a terrible
problem to have.

------
geofft
> While blatant voting manipulation may be the status quo at a certain other
> startup-oriented link aggregator, it is never good because it breaks the
> integrity of the service.

 _Why_ does it break the integrity of the service? Sockpuppets, sure, but why
does asking friends/acquaintances with established HN accounts (presumably the
HN software can distinguish these cases) for upvotes work contrary to the
goals?

Presumably if you have an account and you "vote well" \-- that is, your
upvotes are well-correlated with what other people upvote and don't downvote
-- you know what people like to see. If a friend asked me to upvote their spam
listicle, or a question they could just ask me and get an answer, or some
politics story irrelevant to hackerdom, I'd say no. If I "manipulate" a
friend's post, I'm making as much of an endorsement of the content as HN-
appropriate as if I upvoted something I saw on the front page. (And if I abuse
that, my upvotes should get disregarded.)

To be clear, I'm not advocating that bugging your friends for upvotes is a
_good_ system. I am advocating that posters asking people who care about HN
for endorsement is explicitly desirable, and the software and community norms
should be designed to reflect this, instead of the community norm deciding
that vote manipulation is an acceptable means to an otherwise-technically-
unsupported end.

------
vezzy-fnord
I've been noticing recently that submissions I post will go for hours without
upvotes, and then at some point around the 7th hour or so they'll climb to the
middle of the front page with around 15-20 upvotes.

Is this manual intervention, or is HN testing out some new heuristic?

~~~
halviti
This is just how things on the internet work.

Think about it logically. Not every person is going to see every single new
submission. It takes time for the submission, if it is any good, to gain
momentum and rise to the level that more people will see it. The more people
that see it, the more votes it will receive.

Unless your submission is really popular or noteworthy for some reason, 8
hours seems fairly typical for an average submission.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Except from my observations, at such a timeframe most of them simply die from
lack of visibility, or even if they do gain upvotes, they don't actually hit
the front page (I think a time-based penalty?).

I was thinking out loud because dang has been speaking of HN testing out a new
feature to resurrect posts from hellbanned users (and because HN has been
sending out emails asking people to repost stories), and assumed some other
mechanism is also being tried out.

~~~
dang
You're referring to a few different experiments, but the one relevant to your
question upthread is what I wrote about at [1], specifically "reviewing the
story stream for high-quality submissions and occasionally lobbing one or two
of them onto the bottom of the front page".

How this currently works is that when we notice a substantive overlooked
story, we add it to a pool. Every now and then software picks one from the
pool and randomly places it near the bottom of the front page. It does that by
reducing the time decay and/or adding a small number of points. If too much
time has gone by for a small change to suffice, the software doesn't try, and
instead we sometimes email an invitation to repost the story.

This system would never add 15 points, nor place a story as high as the middle
of the front page, so if that's what you saw it means the community noticed
the post at the bottom and took it from there—which is the intent of doing
this in the first place. We don't much care which stories get taken up this
way vs. which don't. The idea is to do the minimum necessary to give high-
quality stories a second chance and mollify the cruelty of /newest.

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134)

------
onion2k
It's worth noting that there are two sorts of posts that people will try to
game the voting process - submissions by people who want the status of higher
karma among their peers and submissions by startup founders who want
"traction"[1]. That is to say, people believe there is actual, real tangible
value in getting upvotes. To that end, while it'd be nice for HN to be more
organic, unless there's a penalty for gaming the system it's not going stop
just because people ask nicely.

[1] The traction you get on a site like HN is useful for feedback but it
probably won't covert to sales unless you building something for other
startups. It's not _real_ take-it-to-the-investors traction.

~~~
shubhamjain
I would point out that, getting karma using submission isn't that hard.
Considering that Hacker News is very tolerant to re-submissions, you can
usually land your submission to front page, posting some of the many awesome
articles that you might have read from here. Some of the articles have been
posted dozens of times, yet they articulate interesting discussion, even after
being posted nth-time.

~~~
dang
True, but there are two distinct cases.

1\. You post something awesome that you saw on HN that didn't get any
traction. This we encourage! It's a kind of community service and deserves
karma, though arguably the original submitter should share some.

2\. You post something that has had significant attention on HN already. This
is ok, but only for the very best stories and only after a year or so (cf. the
FAQ linked at the bottom of the page).

~~~
shubhamjain
Does HN penalize submission violating the second point?

~~~
dang
We bury the post as a duplicate.

------
zackbloom
I can say from personal experience that it is much easier to get on the
frontpage if you have a group of four or five people ready to upvote your
content. It is possible to get a post to rise without that, but it often takes
a handful of reposts.

I believe the crux of this issue is not enough people frequent the new page
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest)).
If that page got enough traffic, the legitimate votes would outweigh all but
the most systematic attempts to 'game' the system.

~~~
msl09
I can speak for myself that I often forget that the new page exist.

------
rndn
Idea for a fix: Perhaps HN should have separate karma to reward upvoting on
/new on links that are successful later, much like reddit used to have (or
still has?) trophies for correctly predicting that a link reaches the
frontpage. If there is more incentive to vote on new items you get more
accurate estimates of the link quality, and it also _does_ warrant reward to
sift through lists with such a low SNR.

------
kemiller
We've seen some legitimate posts consistently reported and removed. There are
definitely fishy dynamics.

~~~
tptacek
The stuff they do to detect voting rings is broader than you might expect, so
if you're submitting things and having them fail, consider not telling your
friends about it.

------
edpichler
Despite all of these problems, I always have a good reading here on HN.

~~~
bosdev
The issue isn't that content rises which isn't good, it's that good content
doesn't rise. So there might be 3x more good stuff getting posted than
actually makes it onto the frontpage.

~~~
edpichler
Yes, thinking a little bit more, I agree with you. But in my case, just as it
is, HN has so much good content that I can't read it all.

------
protomyth
I have better luck getting upvoted on weekends or as a side article to a
topic-of-the-day, but I tend to submit articles that are either directly
computer related or about systems that are not going as planned.

------
aakilfernandes
HN really should allow resubmissions after a certain number of days. Its fine
to have an imperfect algorithm, its rather frustrating to pretends its
perfect.

~~~
tptacek
It does. Just put ?resubmitted=true (or any other junk) at the end of your
URL. Wait a couple days before doing it.

Don't resubmit if your original submission generated a thread, or hit the
front page (you can resubmit if that happens later in the year).

~~~
JoshTriplett
Or, more simply and without actually sending query parameters to the site,
append an empty anchor '#'.

~~~
tptacek
The one reason I have not to just put empty anchors on pages is that people
might write comments saying your story is a "dupe" if you don't make it
obvious that was intentional.

(But then, they may do that anyways).

------
mbrutsch
No worries, it's just not worth it to post on HN.

------
stefantalpalaru
Sure, don't worry about wasting your time submitting links that have a 80-90%
chance of being ignored. Do what I do and, once you manage to get enough karma
points to no longer care about them, simply stop trying to contribute.

There's always lobste.rs for when you really want to share something with your
peers.

~~~
chilicuil
lobste.rs is only accessible through invitation, can you send me one?, echo
bUBqYXZpZXIuaW8K | base64 -d

~~~
stefantalpalaru
Invitation sent. I don't know when they disabled the form to ask for an
invitation. I used that more than a year ago when I joined. Maybe it's the
curse of any online community to get shittier as the time passes...

~~~
dragandj
Stefan, would you please send me an invite to lobste.rs?

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11thEarlOfMar
I love the irony of this post.

------
notacoward
> While blatant voting manipulation may be the status quo at a certain other
> startup-oriented link aggregator

As I was recently told...

> No acerbic swipes on Hacker News, please.

Let's try to avoid double standards, OK?

------
sobkas
>it is never good because it breaks the integrity of the service.

So you are trying to imply that HN(or any other link aggregator) have
integrity?

