

What if successful posts on HackerNews are just luck? - acemtp
http://blog.ploki.info/what-if-successful-posts-on-hackernews-are-just-luck-post-mortem-of-what-if-successful-startups-are-just-lucky/

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clarky07
Everything is luck, and everything isn't luck. I make the comparison talking
about my app business. Making a great app is like buying a lottery ticket that
happens to have an expected outcome of greater than 0. The better you make the
app, the more likely it is to succeed. If it's a great app, it will make some
money, but to have a hit you also have to have a lot of luck. You pretty much
can't have a hit though without making it good.

It's the same with a post on HN. You have to actually have good content, but
that is not enough to guarantee the front page. You have to have good content,
and you have to get lucky. I've had stuff get near the top of the front page
and get > 15k views and I've had similar content fall off the new page with
just a few views and no votes. As with the apps though, you can't have hit if
it's crap. You have to be good and lucky.

~~~
_greim_
The word "luck" suggests a chaotic nature to the outcomes; the initial
conditions being the time of day of the post, the first few up/down votes,
what people are online and browsing at the moment. Of course controlling for
quality content, as you say.

But there might also be some intrinsic aspect to successful posts that's hard
to analyze and replicate and that is entirely orthogonal to quality, such that
that post would have made it to the popular page even under different initial
conditions. So it's "luck" in the sense that it hits some sweet spot in the
fractal plane of our imagination.

------
petercooper
Not entirely related and this could just be coincidence, but.. I've seen a few
cases lately where people have linked
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest) or
just asked people to go there to vote their story up and the stories have
fallen off the front page sharply despite doing well.

People used to claim getting people to hit /newest was the best way to
encourage votes (since votes from direct linking to items were penalized or
not counted in some way) but I suspect votes made from direct visits to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest) are
now also subject to the same fate.

~~~
minimaxir
"Stories have fallen off the front page sharply despite doing well" is an
instance of flagging overcompensation, not punishment for vote rigging.

Also, some domains have been penalized, which is why some articles fail to
make the front page even with many votes on r/newest (e.g. medium.com)

~~~
fn
Why are some domains penalized? Just curious.

~~~
minimaxir
Usually domains with a high submission quantity of typically low quantity
content. (imgur.com, quora.com, qz.com.) However, higher-quality domains such
as github.com and arstechnica.com get penalized as an offset to the fact that
duplicate submissions result in upvotes.

See the full list at: [http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-
really...](http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-
works.html)

~~~
clarky07
> However, higher-quality domains such as github.com and arstechnica.com get
> penalized as an offset to the fact that duplicate submissions result in
> upvotes.

I've never understood that. Submitting content _IS_ upvoting content. Clearly
if I'm willing to take the time to submit content I want to upvote it. I'd
personally think that multiple submissions of the same thing should get a
bonus, not a penalty.

~~~
minimaxir
That might be a problem if spambots are involved, though.

------
ISL
Luck is useful, but not sufficient.

Luck, or a voting ring, helps a post to reach the front page. Depending upon
the time of day, an article needs to get a few upvotes quickly.

Once it's on the front page, it's up to the content to make it stick.

------
minimaxir
As with startups, it's not about luck, it's about _timing_. The original
article was posted on a Monday, which typically leads to the most amount of
activity (and with the greater amount of activity, the faster the snowball
effect of vitality.)

See also: a heat map analysis I had made analyzing which day-of-week and time
blocks result in the greatest number of viral posts on average on Reddit:
[http://i.imgur.com/ct5LNcG.png](http://i.imgur.com/ct5LNcG.png)

------
Shish2k
Luck and / or referencing a number of lines of javascript...

(I am sorely tempted to re-submit my old links with "in 0 lines of javascript"
at the end, since I'm a python programmer :P It'd be fine if they were viewed
but not upvoted, it just makes me sad when my work gets pushed off the front
page by 100 "blah in pure CSS" links before a single person takes a look :( )

~~~
polymatter
well, that just suggests that HN viewers heavily skew interest for
javascript/CSS rather than python. Either that or its total blind luck.

~~~
Shish2k
Indeed, the community cares about how many lines of what language an app is
written in, rather than what the app /does/ :P

------
nilkn
Success is almost always lucky, but it's rarely only lucky.

Was luck involved in "What if successful startups are just lucky?" making it
to the front page? Surely. But it was also an article that caught the interest
of many prominent HN readers and posters. Luck isn't going to get you anywhere
if nobody cares about what you're saying.

------
err4nt
Is it _luck_ when I accidentally upvote (and can't _un_ -upvote) a HN story
when simply trying to scroll down the page on iPad?

I mean, I'm not saying _all_ my upvotes are haphazard, but there has to be a
margin of 'accidental upvotes' to which the pattern could never be discerned
anyway…

I can't be the only one… ¬_¬

------
acemtp
It's a postmortem of an article who had 20,000 unique visitors and stay 20
hours on frontpage of hackernews.

------
kayoone
Out of my 30 or so submissions, 4 reached the front page. I only wrote one of
those myself though the other were just stuff i found interesting. I found the
timing to be crucial, a time where its relatively early in the day in Europe
and the west coast worked best.

------
yohanatan
I think you guys are overthinking this. In the grand scheme of life and the
universe, is getting a 'successful post' on HackerNews really all that high up
on the list of things to care about?

------
infruset
No one from North Korea visited your page. That must hurt.

------
jheriko
pretty sure there is a lot of that... but there is with all success. its just
downplayed because people like to think they earned things they didn't - and
vice versa that failures are not their fault.

------
acemtp
Thank you moderator... a penality... Why?

------
danso
It is just luck. I'm a frequent reader and upvoter of the new section, and
even considering possible auto-penalties, what gets upvoted can be just as
dependent on non-content factors (which I'll conflate with "luck") as it is on
actual merit.

The easiest non-controllable factor is: external exposure and canonical IDs.
Some stories jump to the top not because a whole bunch of people were reading
the New page, but a whole bunch of people were on Twitter/Reddit/Slashdot/NYT
and then tried to be the first to submit a story...if they all used the same
link, then the first submitter gets all the upvotes, and the OP benefits from
that.

The second uncontrollable factor -- ostensibly -- is title. Did the OP have a
great link-baity title? That'll catch the eye of New post readers. Obviously,
you can take the vigilante action of writing your own title and hoping that it
isn't egregious enough to get flagged before it hits the front page...but that
is also "luck"

And of course, time of day and activity is important. Did your great tech blog
post come at a time when Apple announced a bunch of new products, or when the
NSA got caught red-handed again? Instead of 30 possible open spots on the
front page, you may have been competing for 20.

\---

I've seen great stories not get a single second upvote, and then resubmitted
the next day and get hundreds of votes...and nothing about the user or
submission would suggest that the first submitter was punished. It's just luck
of the draw many times. I've managed to rack up a decent amount of karma but
I've never thought it was because my submissions are higher quality than
anyone else's...and conversely, people who feel they don't get any traction
shouldn't take it personally.

