
Ask HN: I feel that my submissions are severely underrated. What to do? - s9w
During the last 90 days I submitted 4 stories. None gathered even a single point, although they were moderately successful on Reddit. My submissions happened at a good time, had descriptive titles and similar submissions gathered significant more traction. Maybe not all of them are prefect for the HN audience but they were all high quality and the result was as surprising as disappointing. Am I doing something wrong besides not making my friends vote?<p>Fore reference: Here are the submissions:<p>- Yesterday: Show HN about a font comparison tool I wrote. Was on r&#x2F;programming front page for almost an entire day. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9957472<p>- A webGL visualization of a diffusion process. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9605938<p>- An article (IPython Notebook) about generating a gauss-distributed number range. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9499845<p>- An article (IPython Notebook) about the 2D Ising model and a program I wrote about to solve it. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9546872
======
chrisbennet
>What to do?

Stop caring about your internet popularity points? (And it don't mean that in
a snarky way.)

While I realize many people view HN as an an advertising media for their
personal "brand", I prefer to think of submissions as a _gift_ to the
community that doesn't require their validation or thank-you.

~~~
lewisl9029
I don't think it's all about popularity or branding.

The community does suffer when genuinely interesting stories slip through
/newest without getting any attention.

If we can do anything about it, I think we should.

------
joshstrange
> Am I doing something wrong besides not making my friends vote?

No, you're not doing anything wrong, I've found HN to be very hit or miss. As
other commenters have pointed out the first few votes (in <30min) are the ones
that matter most. If you can get 4+ you have a chance of being on the first
few pages of HN and from there it's truly up to the content before that...
Luck.

I've posted blog posts (of mine) before and had them do quite well (top 5 or
better on front page) and other on other interesting topics (like "My
experience with Coin and why it will ultimately fail"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9929531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9929531))
not get a single vote (though I have seen a jump in page visits after
submitting). All of that said I would suggest against trying to get friends to
vote on your posts as you could get (shadow) banned for running a "voting
ring" even though 4-6 votes would allow your post to compete (It's hard to
resist I know).

------
dang
The problem of good stories not escaping /newest is real. There is a bit of
sample bias in your question, though. Your two submissions before those four
did ok:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8881488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8881488)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8589671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8589671).
Two out of six doesn't sound as bad as zero out of four.

Arguably those two were more appealing HN submissions than the subsequent
four. The font post and the WebGL demo are both the sort of thing users have
seen a lot of, and the other two were pretty specialized. But there's so much
randomness in what gets traction that it's impossible to know for sure.

To mitigate this randomness, a small number of reposts are ok when a story
hasn't had significant attention yet. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html),
plus a recent discussion at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9828818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9828818).
But please don't delete an earlier submission in order to repost it. Instead
just use a slightly different URL to get past the duplicate detector.

Titles may make a difference. I think
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9546872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9546872)
buried the lede: "Algorithms, physics and pictures from the Ising model (ipynb
and c++ program)" isn't as clear as the article's actual title: "Magnets: How
do they work? Exploring the 2D Ising model". Not everyone knows what the Ising
model is, but everybody loves magnets. Similarly,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9605938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9605938)
should at least have had "Show HN" on it, and maybe could have been clearer.

------
jacquesm
HN has a very limited amount of front page area and the new page scrolls by
insanely fast. Depending on the number of spammers active when you submit you
might not even be on the homepage for more than 15 minutes. So if you want to
help out then I suggest visiting the new page frequently, upvoting the good
stuff (keep an eye out for dupes, and remember to check pages 2 and 3 as well)
and flagging spam, those are the biggest factors in getting quality content
noticed and not doing these things by enough people are a major factor in good
content being lost.

How to spot a spammer...

It's a bit of a Bayesian approach but these factors help me to decide whether
to flag content or not:

\- new account

\- no comment participation (or maybe just a 'test' comment)

\- first link posted within seconds of account creation

\- low quality content

\- always submitting the same domain

\- re-submitting the same url over and over again

\- many submissions per day

If it's a 'mild case' then I flag the entry, if it is more serious (10+
submissions in a relatively short time for instance) then I mail the
moderators.

------
cdvonstinkpot
I once got an email from one of the HN mods asking me to re-submit one of my
posts (w/ a new URL) that they noticed didn't get the amount of attention it
was worth. They said a re-submit function might be implemented for worthy
posts which deserve more attention if their test works out.

~~~
informatimago
Oh, that's why I see duplicate posts on /news... I'll have to filter them out.

~~~
dang
What duplicate posts are these? Considering how much diligence goes into
identifying duplicates—both by us and by community-spirited users—I'm
skeptical that many last for long.

The vast majority of articles we invite people to repost never made the front
page in the first place. That's why we're inviting them.

------
hermanmerman
There are 25 links on /new, the oldest being 27 min ago. So your post has 27
minutes to gather the attention of enough people (7-8 upvotes is OK) to
actually surface to the frontpage. This is not a lot fo time, especially for
IPython Notebooks which need time to be read/appreciated. Maybe reddit is the
community you need :/

~~~
s9w
I can agree only partially. That's basically similar to the problem that
imageposts are vastly more popular than anything else on reddit etc. But HN
does have a huge focus on quality posts and takes big measures to ensure that.
Also the notebooks were with many colorful pictures (and even videos!), and
that even applies only to the two least relevant submissions.

~~~
hermanmerman
you're right, but HN is so focused that there is only one /new page, so the
competition is brutal.

------
mswen
I noted that even when a submission doesn't get any comments on HN or any
upvotes - I still get 6 to 10 referral hits on a story I published on my blog.
Of course I would hope that people might become engaged enough to comment or
upvote on HN but I am at least moderately pleased that I got some kind of
visit out of posting on HN.

~~~
giltleaf
That's true for me as well. I try and follow a policy that if the title is
curious enough to get me to click it (which only works because people are good
here about not posting clickbait), I will give it an upvote as long as the
article isn't complete trash.

------
DanielBMarkham
Welcome to the club.

It's a lottery. You submit an article -- an if enough people in a narrow niche
are online at that exact time, read the article, and come back and vote?
You're in the game.

It's not a meritocracy. Not even close. If you like submitting, keep it up! I
do. But don't expect any feedback, positive or negative, unfortunately.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"It's not a meritocracy. Not even close."

In one sense, but in others it kinda is. It's really a mixture. It has to be
both good _and_ lucky.

"Total crap" implies "will not make front page", but the converse is not true.
"Will not make the front page" doesn't really imply _anything_ , much less
"total crap".

Or so I see it, having had several articles make the front page and others
that seemed to me to be of equal (or in some cases, greater) interest sink
without a trace.

------
rwhitman
HN has a bit more diverse mix of users than r/programming, including a healthy
amount of non-technical or semi-technical people, so my suggestion would be
giving some context to the project in a blog post rather than only linking to
the github page might help.

The day and time of your post submission also has an enormous weight on what
makes it to the front page. Great article about this from a few years back:
[http://silverman.svbtle.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-
hacker-...](http://silverman.svbtle.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker-news)

------
waterlesscloud
The first few votes are the crucial ones. Once you have those, your submission
has enough visibility that it will get a fair shake based on its quality.

The problem is those first few votes are essentially random. You can't do
anything about it. Just keep submitting.

------
mcnamaratw
Those sound very interesting to me. I wish I'd seen them, and I'm going to go
visit your 2nd and 4th links right now.

HN just has a lot of traffic all going through one main view. Unless a
submission proves that the government is taking away (and/or restoring) our
anonymity/privilege/guns/lisp/java/bitcoins, it's pretty hard to get shelf
space.

Regarding rating ... except for submissions optimized purely for popularity, I
don't think upvotes are a "rating" at all. I could easily see Marcus Aurelius
getting four upvotes and Caligula getting 500. That's not their Emperor
Rating.

EDIT: The DLA thing is cool.

------
danso
That font-compare tool is pretty cool...you should definitely resubmit in a
few days. Thanks for pointing it out (and making it).

------
S4M
I had a brief look at your article about gauss-distributed number range, and I
am sorry to say that I don't find it particularly interesting, it's just some
basic probabilities notion.

------
bbcbasic
I think the more specialized and geeky the topic, the fewer people who can
participate in the conversation about it, and therefore the less popular it
will be.

Most of the popular stuff seems to be light on the technical side. More often
it is business, lifestyle or a high level opinion on a technical subject, not
too deep.

If it is an online hacked-up app, there has to be a wow factor, a surprise, a
'why didn't I think of that'.

------
logfromblammo
It's pretty much a not-quite-random lottery. If you got no up-votes or replies
the first time around, you can try resubmitting at a different time of day.

Please don't engage in shady, SEO-like practices to try to game the system.
Such practices represent an existential risk to the integrity of the
community, and an undue burden upon the site operators and moderators.

------
lewisl9029
I always thought that instead of just _encouraging_ people to check the
/newest page, wouldn't it be more effective to just make the front page be a
split view between /newest and /new (the current front page)?

~~~
dang
Couple problems: that would be a dramatic change to the front page; and
evidence suggests that people would eventually just tune out the /newest part.

We tested randomly placing stories from /newest onto the front page, but it
didn't work—the median story is far too poor in quality. It basically just
mixed junk into the front page, arguably the worst thing one could do to the
front page. If we had rolled that out to everyone as a feature, the main
effect would have been a spike in "why is this on Hacker News" comments.

~~~
lewisl9029
I still feel it'd be worthwhile to experiment with having the /newest content
displayed _explicitly_ as a section on the front page. There's no risk of
people confusing /newest content as regular front page content this way.

It's definitely true that some people will eventually tune out the /newest
section in this setup, but those are probably the same people who wouldn't
have checked /newest regularly anyways. However, for those who wouldn't mind
checking out /newest once in a while, this would remove a great deal of the
friction (I realize that clicking the new link isn't a lot of friction to
begin with, but every bit helps).

------
jessaustin
This submission already has 23 points. Congratulations!

Seriously, though, the only way to "win" is to play a lot. Four submissions in
90 days is nothing. Try to get that down to four submissions in a week for
better results.

~~~
s9w
But that is only feasible if you submit things you don't create yourself. Or
you're a "rockstar programmer". There is only so much stuff people can do

~~~
jessaustin
I have only rarely submitted something I created myself. The point of
submitting (from the site's perspective) is not to publicize one's own work
but rather to expose interesting content to the attention of HN users. That is
the purpose of those valuable "internet points".

[EDIT] As 'dang observes, I was somewhat unclear above. Just as it is fine to
submit interesting stuff from other sources, it's just as fine to submit your
own interesting stuff.

~~~
dang
But it's totally fine to share something you've made. Implicit in posting a
regular article is "I found this interesting". If you've put time into making
something, that's a variant of the same thing.

------
smoyer
Perhaps there are enough of us using Reddit that we don't bother reading the
same content here? What happens if you submit here first (and Reddit later)?

~~~
s9w
It was always HN first

------
gearoidoc
HN is far from a meritocracy I'm afraid.

~~~
danso
Er...what would a meritocracy even be in this situation? The world of
interesting posts is not so simple that there is one true, obvious metric for
one makes one post better than another.

~~~
krapp
Arguably, that one true, obvious metric is supposed to be the karma score.
Bigger numbers are objectively better than smaller ones.

~~~
danso
Ahhh...OK, I thought GP meant that posts don't succeed based on quality alone.
That said, I do agree with Karma score _not_ being the sole determiner of
worth...however, all other signals have their own flaws (such as domain-based
or keyword-based penalties) while being less transparent to boot.

------
scarmig
Hacker News is very centralized: there's one main view that 99% of people see,
and the vagaries of whether you end up on it are dependent on whether the
train of someone who might upvote it was late today, or whether standup ran
over.

If it's any consolation, Hacker News points track the drachma in value very
closely.

------
pbreit
Those are all of very narrow interest.

------
kleer001
Change your feelings. It's much easier than changing how HN works or what
peeps on HN do.

------
flippinburgers
Is there a way to permanently block submissions by people who whine about not
getting recognition that they think they deserve?

