
Getting Featured on Hacker News - dougk16
https://aytwit.com/blog/getting_featured_on_hacker_news
======
DanHulton
Semi-related, but is there some friendly algorithm behind the scenes at HN
that resubmits articles if they go flying off /newest without a lot of
attention? I submitted a blog post last week that made it to the front page,
but its path there was kind of odd. I had submitted it the night before and
watched it scroll listlessly off the first page of /newest. The next morning,
it was on the front page with a posted time of "5 hours ago", probably a good
8 hours after I originally posted it.

~~~
dang
There is! Humans find them and software reposts them. It's called the second-
chance pool and is described at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)
and various links back from there. There are so many good submissions that get
overlooked by the randomness of the initial traction wave—especially the
quieter, offbeat kind, which often are the best kind of submission for HN,
uncorrelated with anything else. I sometimes email people to let them know
their post will be re-upped, but it looks like I didn't do that in your case.

By the way, if anyone sees that kind of post languishing without attention,
please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. It's clear that many if not most are
still getting missed, and curiosity is what we're optimizing for, so we love
getting those emails. One day we're going to write software to make this
system more formal and open it to everyone.

~~~
DanHulton
Really neat! So it seems that the best way to get featured on HN is still
just... find or write interesting stuff. Good to know, thanks!

~~~
dang
I wouldn't say we're there, but that's certainly the goal.

------
gtrubetskoy
I once submitted a blog post [1] and later received an email from someone at
HN saying that it was a great article but didn't do so well and if I re-submit
it, they will make sure it does better, so I did and it went to the top.

[1] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16862077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16862077)

~~~
eganist
Would be interesting to see the correspondence, but don't feel obligated.

~~~
adenadel
They do it frequently. I've had it happen several times. The specific text
isn't particularly exciting. They just give you a link to resubmit if you're
interested. You also get an extra upvote upon submission (and I imagine there
is more of a bump behind the scenes).

~~~
x2f10
What does HN feel about this? Is it curation from the staff or is it selective
manipulation? On first blush, I'm for it... but I'd be interested to see what
others think.

~~~
Insanity
at first thought I'd be against it. Because they essentially bump what they
think is good, and it does not (necessarily) reflect the community. Sometimes
things slip through at HN though so giving a nudge to resubmit sounds like a
good idea.

Tbh, I don't really mind either way, I've enjoyed most content on here.

~~~
dang
We bump what we think the community might like and is aligned with the site
guidelines. And only to the lower half of the front page, whence it soon falls
away if we guessed wrong. The posts aren't necessarily what we ourselves like
or think is good; mostly we don't have time to decide on that.

~~~
untilHellbanned
You have time to decide what to bump, but not to decide what you like? Makes
no sense.

~~~
moorhosj
They explicitly said they bump what they think the community might like. It
doesn’t take a thorough reading of every submission to make that guess.

~~~
hammock
It does, unless you want to create an echo chamber (which HN somewhat is)

~~~
dang
What would make HN less of an echo chamber?

~~~
hammock
I don't think it can be solved by moderation, if that makes you feel better

~~~
dang
It makes me feel worse. But I'd like to hear why you say that HN somewhat is
an echo chamber, and what you think would make it less of one, or where you
might look for examples of non-echo-chambers on the internet. You're welcome
to reply here, or email hn@ycombinator.com.

It's possible that you've observed something that's not on our radar, and such
information is important for us to be aware of, even if we can't solve it by
moderation.

------
Carpetsmoker
HN vote count seems pretty arbitrary. A few months ago I submitted one of my
articles and it got 2 points. Someone else submitted it the same or next day
and it got 111 points.

10 months ago someone submitted one of my articles and it got 3 points. It got
submitted again earlier this month and that one has 401 points.

~~~
danso
Like most things in life, showing up, and luck, is 50-90% of it. You may have
submitted during peak traffic and simply got lost in the flood. Or you
submitted at a time when the people most interested in your post happened to
be awake or on lunch break.

~~~
GuiA
At least in grandparent’s testimony, it sounds like the article still ended up
on the front page after the second try. That’s pretty great! If articles of
quality always made it to the front page on the second submission at most,
we’d be living in a very good world.

------
rotub
I once got to the top for a non-tech related post when I shared my story about
skateboarding 86km from Sydney to Wollongong.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5530044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5530044)

Still amazed it was well received here and grateful for all the friendly and
encouraging comments

~~~
js2
The linked to story is dead. Fortunately archive.org has it:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130228011236/http://www.rotub....](https://web.archive.org/web/20130228011236/http://www.rotub.me/blog/my-
skate-of-mind.html)

------
brianzelip
A bit of the weird old Web, found via the linked article!

[https://dougkoellmer.com/](https://dougkoellmer.com/)

~~~
dougk16
The old web??? That's Web 4.0 baby!

In seriousness thanks for poking around and linking that. I'm interested in
taking the engine running my site to the next level, think Wordpress or some
other site builder with an easy admin console so people can create similar
sites with arbitrary content. Let me know if anyone reading this would be
interested.

Here's proof that it's at least a generalized engine:
[http://eagrereader.appspot.com/](http://eagrereader.appspot.com/)

~~~
CarVac
Reminds me of Eagle Mode, an interesting user interface experiment.

~~~
dougk16
I wasn't aware of this project. Just googled it:
[http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/index.html](http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/index.html)

Thanks, I'll be looking into this more.

------
andreyk
For those curious, I wrote a similar little post:
[https://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/project/what-brief-
ha...](https://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/project/what-brief-hacker-news-
fame-looks-like/)

Don't think I mentioned it in there, but this was also through a 'consider re-
submitting' email (though I've had a couple more on front page without that
process since). That post was a ton of work (like 6 weeks straight) so it was
nice to get the bump and get it more visibility.

To this day that post gets a lot of views via organic search results, though
the huge traffic spike died down pretty quickly. I try to submit stuff a
couple of times these days (as you can see in my profile) to give the lottery
a shot more than once, but am also fine with it being pretty luck (and
curation) based.

------
0xferruccio
I once got an article to the top of the front page and it was because it was
about what I learned in 10yrs of blogging.

I expected a couple of other submissions of things I made like
[https://polispulse.org](https://polispulse.org) to do great, but they didn’t!

Success on HN cannot be engineered or tricked and content that is genuinely
good always surfaces. I’m pretty sure it’s not economically viable to find a
hack to rank an average submission. It’s by far easier and more rewarding to
produce something worth sharing :)

------
burtonator
I wrote up a post about getting on HN and how it's helped me build my Open
Source project due to the feedback.

[https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-
lesso...](https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lessons-for-
entrepreneurs.html)

I have actual stats rather than speculation in the article if you read my
post.

It's more like 15k users over 24 hours... then usually another 5k. I included
full google analytics charts if you're interested.

~~~
dougk16
Thanks, your post is much more informative. :) I was writing mine from more of
a story-telling perspective, but I'll be following up with a harder post-
mortem.

FWIW I estimated visitor count mostly based on a requests per second metric I
had handy from GAE console. Also sanity checked against other similar blog
posts like ours to see other people's numbers. I'd say 50K was a good lower
bound. It was hard to say but I'd be surprised if it was as low as 15K-20K. In
my experience Google Analytics numbers can be really deceiving. Especially
when you compare them to other tracking methods, and go "huh?". Or your other
tracking methods are messed up. Either way! Lies, damn lies, and statistics,
as they say. HN audience probably uses ad blockers a lot more too which could
potentially really skew things, unless you're doing GA stuff server-side.

I made a conscious choice to not even track visitor count, which I'll expand
on...in another blog post!

Good luck with Polar!

~~~
alain94040
I have been at the top of HN several times, and I think we got 10-20K max. So
15K sounds reasonable, I'd say 50K looks off unless you stayed at the #1 spot
for more than a day.

Also, the traffic is not very targeted. A lot of people reading news, but not
necessarily early users of whatever you are doing. So traffic dies down pretty
quickly.

PS: it's funny to see the bots posting anything that got popular on HN to
reddit, and see the smaller peaks of traffic from Reddit the following days.

------
less_penguiny
As an extra data point, I've gotten ~300 votes twice and each time caused
about 10-15k visits from HN over 24hrs and about 150 email subscribers.

The secondary downstream effects might have doubled that, e.g. due to tweets,
reddit postings, discussion elsewhere etc.

~~~
dougk16
150!? I was so happy about my first 6 subscribers. :)

How do you track visits? As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, if you're
using GA I would expect it to be skewed by ad blockers from the HN crowd.

~~~
less_penguiny
Just GA. Now that you mention it though, given all the pop-up blocking, my
numbers are likely underestimated. I'll cross-reference with server logs next
time.

re 6 vs. 150 subscribers. The trick to getting people to sign up is... (you
are not going to like this)... a pop-up.

People on forums will complain about it.

People will sign up with fake and insulting email addresses to spite you. You
may even get upset.

But my god will you gather emails from the people out there who actually care
about the work you are doing.

~~~
dougk16
> The trick to getting people to sign up is... (you are not going to like
> this)... a pop-up.

LOL. No sir, I don't like it!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDGlN6mluGA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDGlN6mluGA)

But I am going to put the subscription form at least at the bottom of each
post, and think of other ways to get it in front of people. I may consider a
popup in the future if I put the work in to make sure people who are already
subscribed generally don't see it. Like when they confirm their subscription,
set a cookie that will block the popup. Something like that. Or a "don't show
me this again" button. I didn't see a popup on your site FWIW.

EDIT: Or duh, just a URL param like show_popup=false in the notification email
URL.

Anyway thanks for the feedback. I'm realizing now that I've read your posts in
the past and really enjoyed them, so you have another subscriber!

~~~
less_penguiny
With my popup, I try to wait to show it until a moment when I feel the visitor
is actually interested. At first approximation, that's when they have been on
the page more than 60 seconds and scrolled down more than 70%.

Like you mentioned, I also use cookies to ensure people who have already
subscribed (or hit X on a previous pop-up) don't see it again.

And thanks for subscribing! I love these random encounters on HN.

------
tnolet
I had two blog posts hitting the top 4 in the last month. I write a fairly in
depth post every week and submit. There was no real pattern I could recognize.
Some went crazy, some got 0 upvotes. The quality of all post was very similar.

------
throwing838383
"I was feeling down in the dumps and wanted to revel in my misery a bit more
by submitting Thoughter to Hacker News" I see, I'm not the only one who does
this. lol.

------
magical_mishka
Never thought Hacker News could generate that much traffic!

------
mortdeus
come on friends, we can get him back up to #1!

------
minimaxir
It's very important to note that getting to the top of Hacker News is an
exception, not a rule for good projects (and definitely should not be a
primary marketing strategy, as it's just a bonus).

I haven't seen an impact-of-getting-to-the-top-of-HN post in a very long time.
Anecdotally, the traffic for a post getting to the top of HN is not what it
used to be.

~~~
dang
I don't know about traffic, but we tend to downweight meta posts, including
ones about getting to the top of HN, because as a genre they're too samey and
HN thrives on diffs. This post is an exception though, partly because the
project resonated with the community in an unusual way, and partly because of
the heart with which the story is written.

You're right that it isn't a marketing strategy. It's too much of a lottery.
Worse, when projects or startups try to get attention that way, they make
themselves less interesting.

~~~
Alex3917
> You're completely right that it isn't a marketing strategy, though.

Have you thought about creating a formal program to preflight more in-depth
content? It's hard to justify spending 100 hours writing a blog post when the
chances of having more than zero people see it depend on whether or not Elon
Musk smoked weed that day or whatever. I realize it's partly just impossible
to predict what people will be interested in, but that could be a way to
encourage people to create more interesting stuff.

~~~
dang
Yes, I've thought about that a lot. I agree with you that the economics are
off—not in terms of money, but time and energy and attention. If that could
change, then the pool of interesting projects and articles might grow, which
would be great for us all.

How would you go about it?

~~~
Alex3917
I think it's fine just to have people submit proposals, getting the proposal
approved, and then creating the content and having the final post approved,
rejected, or getting suggested edits. This could either be done by the mods or
by some sort of rotating panel. Then the final content could be treated like
the jobs postings, where there is a separate tab for preflighted content and
it lives on the front page for at least some minimum amount of time, longer if
there is engagement.

It could also be interesting to try something like Edge.org, where different
people create content around a given question or theme.

------
hhanesand
Ouch that scrolling though

~~~
dougk16
Oh could you expand? Something wrong on mobile or something? On some Android
devices things were wonky but I thought I fixed everything.

~~~
hhanesand
I was reacting to the lack of scrolling inertia on Mobile Safari. Running
12.2.

~~~
dougk16
Thank you I will check that out. Something about the side menu bar throws
things off on mobile sometimes.

~~~
frosted-flakes
It's because the document/body itself isn't scrollable. Only the
".content_scroller" div _within_ the body is scrollable, which causes all
sorts of problems.

Rather than having two fixed height scrollable divs beside each other, you
should remove the fixed height on .content_scroller and fix the sidebar to the
side with `display: fix`.

~~~
dougk16
Thanks for the tips. I opted for that .content_scroller because when the whole
body was scrollable the side menu was really jumpy and glitchy on the Android
phones I tested on. It also was doing weird things with the address bar,
hiding and showing it in a seemingly random way.

I think you mean `position: fixed` rather than `display: fix` right? In which
case the side bar class .side_bar_column already has that. Unless you mean a
different class/element?

Anyway looks like I'll have to attack this scroll issue a little more
systematically. People usually complain about scrolljacking. I'm doing the
absolute opposite, trying to let browsers do their thing themselves, but
apparently that's bad too lol. Can't win.

~~~
frosted-flakes
Yeah, I meant `position: fixed` (brainfart—I knew it didn't sound quite
right). But it shouldn't have any issues at all on Android. It's how most
websites do sticky headers, and I've never seen any glitching.

In any case, there are a lot of reasons for scrolling the main document rather
than having a subscroller, including:

1\. Auto-hiding the address bar when scrolling down on mobile (it's not
weird—all browsers do it) and pull-to-refresh in browsers that have it

2\. Better accessibility because it doesn't break the PageUp/PageDown keys

3\. Momentum scrolling

4\. Better scrolling performance (higher framerate) because browsers optimise
main document scrolling over subscrolling

5\. Support for #fragment linking

6\. etc.[0]

[0] [https://nolanlawson.com/2018/11/18/scrolling-the-main-
docume...](https://nolanlawson.com/2018/11/18/scrolling-the-main-document-is-
better-for-performance-accessibility-and-usability/)

~~~
dougk16
The auto-hiding address bar on my 2 Android phones was straight-up glitchy
with document scrolling, not the "convenience" behavior. Even other sites on
my phone were fine. It was just my site, and I believe I tracked it down the
the fixed side bar. When I get rid of that the scrolling was fine.

All your points have really convinced me to give document scrolling another go
though. Thanks for the list and the link.

