
How to Get Upvoted on Hacker News - RickJWagner
https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-get-upvoted-on-hacker-news-692360e85ef8
======
carrozo
Must we gameify everything? Reverse engineering serendipity is such a
miserable way to think/exist.

~~~
kempbellt
My gut reaction was: Please keep the karma farming to Reddit - if you must...

Though, the article is actually pretty interesting and points people in the
direction of the type of mindset that is appreciated and promoted on
HackerNews - being a maker, and having a curious personality (and sharing it
here).

I think the info in this article _could_ be gamified a bit, but really, it's
usually pretty obvious if someone is sharing something out of genuine interest
in it. It's pretty hard to pretend to be nerding out about a more efficient
algorithm or how to hack together a programmable mirror.

~~~
m463
> being a maker, and having a curious personality

aka "participate in the site" (via show and ask)

------
sillysaurusx
The easiest way is to just email and ask if a story is a good fit.

I don’t think that will scale, but if a story is legitimately interesting and
your email is short, you might find it’s given preference.

The full-time goal of HN is to stay interesting at every timestep. A lot of
the reason people’s interesting stories don’t get upvoted is that there are so
many interesting stories to talk about each day, and there are 30 slots on the
front page. Interesting _discussions_ also take time to foster, so you have to
give content a little bit of time to accumulate well-written comments, which
necessarily appear 30 minutes to several hours after hitting the front page.

Ultimately it’s an interesting intellectual exercise to analyze HN like this,
but probably not too useful. The data hides the underlying fact that HN is
fine-tuned to be interesting. Just be interesting, and eventually you’ll get a
slot. It’s as easy and as hard as that.

~~~
iudqnolq
Email who?

~~~
yorwba
There's a link in the footer.

~~~
iudqnolq
I didn't realize parent meant email the site admins. Thanks!

------
eveFromKarmaFm
Relevant - Effects of title length on upvotes gained by a [Reddit] post:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/durndj/eff...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/durndj/effects_of_title_length_oc/?limit=500)

~~~
minimaxir
And the per-subreddit version:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/duub8p/ave...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/duub8p/average_reddit_submission_score_by_title_length/)

------
rolph
There are times of high usage as evident from analysis of front page, and new
page postings, let this read as "more users on the board make more votes
possible for any one comment or submission".

Be genuine. find things that are interesting to you, and are willing to
discuss with others.

HN is like the digital/intellectual version of walking into a fitness club and
seeing the different levels of expertise and the specialty activities, with
volunteer training coaches. Posts of tabloid-like prurient interest, or
gratuitously illicit content usually dont do well on HN

~~~
blocks110
Agree. Low quality stories won't make the front page, but as someone else
commented, there are many competing high quality stories. And what I find
really fascinating is the extent to which randomness impacts the success of a
particular story. I may get to posting this at one point, but I have simulated
and fitted that first distribution of scores in the article with only 3
parameters: rate of story posting, likelihood of upvote and number of readers.

------
zenlot
Shorter answer: go with the flow, drop your personal opinion and if you
disagree with someone - remain silent.

------
gabia
Seems to be working, congrats! :)

~~~
chmaynard
I claim that pretty much any post with "Hacker News" in the title will attract
attention. And after all, attention from others what we all want, right? (I'm
too lazy to verify this, but at least it sounds plausible.)

~~~
blocks110
OP here, very true. There is a section on that towards the end of the (too
lengthy) article. Posts referencing HN have an average 50% higher score.

------
m463
I note this was posted around noon pacific on a weekend.

------
Noxmiles
What is karma even for? Why should anyone collect as many karma as possible?

