
Best Time to Post on Hacker News: It's Irrelevant - anton_tarasenko
http://antontarasenko.com/2015/04/23/best-time-to-post-its-irrelevant/
======
nothrabannosir
_Here’s another example: Y-Combinator’s Hacker News, which has a solid
community and transparent ranking algorithm._

What? HN's ranking algorithm is notoriously opaque and manual. Or are other
websites even more so?

~~~
anton_tarasenko
Like this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

"How are stories ranked?

On the front page, by points divided by a power of the time since they were
submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way.

Stories on the new page and comments on the comments page are listed
chronologically."

Now, try to find a similar answer for the websites like Facebook or Quora.

~~~
steveklabnik
That's still only a hint. You can grab the source of HN, and it has a more
precise equation, but pg said long ago that, for example, that doesn't have
the anti-spam measures. And empiric observation shows that there are other
factors at play, that come into and out of relevance.

(I don't necessarily think that the algorithm SHOULD be open, but it's clearly
not currently.)

~~~
zxcvcxz
Can you provide a link to HNs source? Last I heard it was closed (but open for
a while before that). I checked the FAQ and didn't see any info.

~~~
steveklabnik
It comes with Arc:
[http://arclanguage.org/install](http://arclanguage.org/install)

------
minimaxir
What is going on with that KDE chart? From the code, it seems like the X-axis
is hour-of-submission, and density is determined by average points per
DOW/hour combo.

So all the chart shows is that the greatest proportion of points from votes on
the weekend come from submissions a few hours later than the proportion of
weekday votes, which doesn't answer the question "is it better to submit on a
weekday or a weekend?"

> _Time-related variables explain less than 1% of variation—meaning,
> unsurprisingly, that the other 99% depend on something else._

Where do you get the 1% figure from? That's not shown anywhere in the code.
You could calculate a R^2 from a linear regression, sure, but the data
violates all the rules that make linear regression valid.

------
antoko
TLDR oversimplifying article is overly simple and gets things wrong and
doesn't consider others.

 _The rules are simple: a user submits a link and title, the community upvote
and downvote this submission._

Yes the rules are simple (they're actually not but they can be simplified),
but yet the article seems to have gotten them wrong, submissions don't have
downvotes.

I starting skimming after that, it appears the metric he's using is number of
upvotes, this is NOT the relevant metric, posters are looking for exposure -
what they want is a position on the front page. While those things are linked
they're not the same. Would also probably want to take into account pageviews
on weekends vs. weekdays as this affects exposure. Maybe it correlates to
votes/no. of submissions, but maybe more people passively consume on weekends
or weekdays.

~~~
anton_tarasenko
Thanks for the correction about downvotes. Fixed.

As for the metrics, being on the front page seems to drive less motivated
traffic. When a user upvotes the link, he cares. When the link gets to the
front page, users click it because it's on the top, not because they're
interested.

Hence, sales or whatever, but one should be interested in upvotes as the
indicator, not the front page.

~~~
antoko
I disagree, if you're wanting something to "go viral" or whatever 100 upvotes
at a busy time, when there are 30 other submissions with over 100 in a similar
timeframe is not nearly as useful as 100 upvotes on say Saturday morning when
there are less submissions and less voting activity.

This is why others have done analysis on the "best time to post" they're not
trying to gather upvotes they're trying to be on the front page for as long as
possible... actually maybe that's a bad assumption on my part, I figured this
was about an eyeball funnel, perhaps people are karma gathering? if it is the
latter then absolutely upvotes is the correct metric.

Personally, I think the focus should be on creating something great and let
that be what drives the upvotes, if its about getting internet points, umm
I've already spent too much time discussing something I don't care about.

~~~
anton_tarasenko
Voting activity is proxy for reading activity. I don't have evidences that
Saturday posting has more exposure than weekday posts given nearly the same
upvote performance.

Agreed on making something great as the end. But delivering the product to the
audience is important for niche products. Then factors like time, website,
text become important (when they matter).

------
andrewstuart2
Actually, I did some research on this that would indicate otherwise about a
year ago after pulling all the articles from the API. Statistically, the best
time to post for average score was Saturday Morning, around 8 GMT IIRC.

It made sense, too. As most analyses will show, fewer articles are posted on
the weekend and therefore _new_ turnover is pretty low.

(Just pulled the numbers again. The average jumps up 4 points at 11 GMT on
Saturday and stays there until 3 GMT on Monday morning)

~~~
andrewstuart2
For those interested, here are the results for the query I ran.

[http://pastebin.com/wV0eQgq0](http://pastebin.com/wV0eQgq0)

And for science, the query:

    
    
        select avg(points), std(points), weekday(created), hour(created) from stories group by weekday(created), hour(created) order by weekday(created), hour(created);

------
arnauddri
looking at this stats here might be the wrong approach.

'How to get on the front page of HN?' is basically the same problem as 'How to
jump from the 'newest''s section front page to the HN's front page before my
post gets replaced by newer posts there?'

To do so, you need to remain long enough on the 'newest''s section front page
which happens when there is less 'posting competition'. So if you post around
8-9am EST (see here: [1]), your post will remains longer on the 'newest' front
page which gives you more time to gather upvotes. At this time, the
competition is such that it is easier to jump on the front page as there are
less items posted.

However, this happens right before a lot of traffic pours into the website
which ensure you can enjoy a lot of visibility/upvotes once you are on the
front page.

[1] [http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-
news/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/)

~~~
iamcurious
>you need to remain long enough on the 'newest''s section front page

Long enough to gather enough upvotes. The number of people upvoting matters,
which changes during the day. It might change in direct proportion to the
number of people submitting new posts. In that case all times would be equal.

~~~
arnauddri
Sure, but once you're past the 'newest' front page, I doubt that you get any
upvote

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tremendo
Ha, relevant, since I was wondering about [1] going mostly unnoticed having
been posted 8 hours prior to [2]. At first my assumption was that surely
Nature is a better source than Yahoo for such an article, but after a quick
read maybe not, Yahoo seems to provide more references to supporting articles
even within Nature.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9423401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9423401)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9425070](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9425070)

~~~
shoyer
Most of this is luck. It takes a certain number of upvotes to make it to the
front page and only links that happens to cross that magic threshold
accumulate significant numbers of votes.

------
solve
Lovely parody on how to do statistics to reach totally wrong conclusions.

~~~
gedrap
Could you share your reasoning?

------
comrade1
There's been so many data-wanking articles posted on HN lately I find it hard
to believe that everyone wants to read yet another. Maybe they got this one
through by posting at the optimal time?

(sorry, I know humor is not allowed on HN. It's serious business here)

~~~
hluska
I dunno, the comments on these 'data-wanking' articles make me a significantly
more useful data consumer. Consider Minimaxir's comment on this thread. Where
else could I get access to these kinds of brains????

