
Ask HN: Why some stories rise while others go unnoticed? - franciscop
I just saw this story &quot;Google Spreadsheets and Python.&quot; in the #1 of HN. I made a library that does almost the same for Node.js ( https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;franciscop&#x2F;drive-db ) but it didn&#x27;t get so much attention compared to it [1].<p>So my question is, what influences on the ranking&#x2F;votes of the stories? I&#x27;m not complaining, just curious, this is my best guess:<p>- Tech: innovative, quality, etc<p>- Landing page&#x2F;PR (or &quot;hacker PR&quot;)<p>- Company name behind it<p>- People you know in the industry+silicon valley?<p>- What else?<p>I have some ideas as I&#x27;ve landed few projects on the front-page of HN, but somehow it seems quite <i>random</i>. I have observed a direct relationship with the mentioned points and appraisal&#x2F;hate in the comments, but not with the vote count. So does anyone have anything to add?<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8914508
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gus_massa
In this case my ordered guess is: (more important first)

* It's a nice blog post that is easier to understand than a github repository. The repository has a good readme, but the blog post has more details.

* Brand recognition: twilio is more famous than you. This gives a little more confidence in the project. (Don't get offended, twilio is more famous than me too.)

* Bonus point for a tweet/photo of patio11.

* Sometimes the fanboys of a language can help. But I'm not sure if phyton is more popular than node.js here

* Luck. Sometimes it's just luck. HN has a system where the mods select an autoresubmit a post to try to reduce the luck factor.

~~~
brudgers
This article from 2009 by Matt Cutts (formerly the web spam guru of Google)
was submitted twice: [https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/write-google-spreadsheet-
from...](https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/write-google-spreadsheet-from-python/)

The high water mark was nine points a few years after it was written. The
first submission was completely ignored.

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tedmiston
Plenty of articles get submitted multiple times and get minimal activity on
some and spikes on others, even when the link is the same.

The odd part about that Google Spreadsheets and Python post today from Twilio
is that underlying library, gspread, is several years old. Twilio is also not
the first one to write about the topic.

Randomness and timeliness to current events definitely play a factor. Maybe
there's a trend right now of going "back to the basics" with things like
microframeworks when it comes to building out MVP side projects.

~~~
franciscop
Trends are a really interesting topic that I didn't consider. Some of the
libraries that got in the front page in HN for me where riding the you might
not need jquery/bootstrap wave (+small libraries), so I totally see that
happening and didn't really consider it. There was definitely a Node.js,
machine learning and arguably now there is a love/hate React wave. I'll try to
dig deeper but this (trends) is not something I consider myself good at.

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27182818284
There are a lot of factors. The time of day of the submission itself can make
a difference.

