
Ask HN: My HN link sank without a trace. What now? - billpg
Earlier, having worked very hard on a very informative and important (IMO) essay, I posted it to HN, where it sank without trace. No votes. No comments.<p>What now?
======
anigbrowl
Get on with your life. What makes the front page depends on time of day,
what's in the news, whether people had a good or bad week, and what all else.
Many, in fact most, of the links I submit also sink like a stone.

Now, it's a double bummer when you write something. But it's still there on
your blog to be discovered and shared later. You could also rewrite or polish
it a bit. I presume it's this: [http://blog.hackensplat.com/2014/07/is-your-
api-broken.html](http://blog.hackensplat.com/2014/07/is-your-api-broken.html)
which I found interesting, but a little bit inaccessible because you fired off
examples all over the place but your basic thesis was sort of buried inside.

This is a problem (a small one - I want to reiterate that I liked it!),
because you're talking to engineers in engineer-speak (thus driving away most
business-minded readers) but what you're actually talking about is a business
problem (directly exposing your transaction handler to the outside world
without building for failure could result in misplaced orders = customer
dissatisfaction and loss of money). You're saying that it's not enough just to
make the interface - you also have to worry about external failures. IMHO the
best way to do this is put the programmer in the customer's position first
(since almost all coders are also consumers, this shouldn't be too hard) and
then work your way back to discussing API fragility.

As for getting more views from HN, I think it's fine to mention an article you
wrote in a comment if it's relevant, or even to resubmit it with or without a
redraft, as you decide as long as you don't do this too often, like once in a
few months.

~~~
billpg
Thanks for the feedback. When I was writing it, I was address the people who
make APIs rather than those who consume them. The bit at the end ("Do I need
to do this") started life as the introduction but I think I put it on the end
because I needed a good way to close it.

I'll have a think about restructuring it before I try submitting it again.
Thanks.

------
minimaxir
Never _expect_ to get any upvotes for your submissions, no matter how good you
think it is, and don't be offended if you get zero upvotes. There's a lot of
luck involved.

Helpful links:

Analysis of all HN submissions before Feb:
[http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-
news/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/)

Analysis of Show HNs since new Show HN feature:
[http://minimaxir.com/2014/07/show-hn/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/07/show-hn/)

~~~
wmf
Which basically means don't bother ever submitting.

~~~
minimaxir
Ideally, you're blogging for intrinsic reasons and not "I want to get famous
and be on the top of Hacker News."

I've been there, it's not that special. :P

~~~
wmf
I don't mean don't blog. I mean keep blogging but don't bother submitting to
HN, because even the few seconds that it takes are wasted.

------
woah
You've got to organize a voting ring. Sadly, I've seen this work quite well
for mediocre submissions several times. I've seen YC companies do this.

~~~
minimaxir
Hacker News has a voting ring detector, so this is not recommended. (it will
penalize articles with a high probability of having a voting ring and
eventually kill them). The Brandery article that was submitted today was
likely hit by a voting ring.

That being said, there _are_ some YC companies that do this. However, the flag
mechanism far counteracts bad articles which have received unjust votes, so
it's an unstable equilibrium.

~~~
dang
If you mean
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054209),
yes, it tripped the voting ring detector. We unkilled that one a while ago.

As for YC company voting rings: certainly this exists, but we penalize them
too. I can't claim that we do it perfectly even-handedly—that would be
claiming no unconscious bias—but we try to. That's one reason we do as much as
we can programmatically, since the software has no such bias.

The principle governing HN is to have the best possible content on the front
page. Anything else would be pound-foolish. Not that we _do_ have the best
possible content, but that's our goal and is what drives our thinking.

~~~
kgc
That link goes to a blank HN page.

~~~
minimaxir
That's because it was killed, again.

~~~
dang
We unkilled it again.

------
PaulHoule
Post it someplace else. These days I consistently get upvotes when I post
things to reddit, so long as I choose a subreddit where the people have a PMA.
(That is, not proggit!)

This best thing you can do to help other people escape this fate is look at
the "new" page often and upvote things that look interesting to you.

------
dang
There's a lot of randomness in what makes the front page. We're working on a
plan to reduce that randomness.

------
ddod
I think this could pretty easily be solved if there was a somewhat small box
on the frontpage with samples from posts from the last hour that haven't made
it past /new yet. This puts the important stage of the democracy (the
primaries, if you will) back in the average users' hands.

------
smacktoward
It happens, alas. It seems like the volume of submissions has been going up,
new links scroll off the first page of /new faster than they used to. So it's
harder to predict what will catch peoples' attention and what won't. It feels
like there's a bigger element of luck to it -- of having submitted it at just
the right time -- than there used to be.

All you can really do is look for other channels to get the word out --
appropriate subreddits? High-profile people on Twitter who are interested in
the subject?

~~~
minimaxir
Note that # of submissions is directly proportional the the time submitted.

[http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-submissions.png](http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-
submissions.png)

------
27182818284
Post it somewhere like Medium and spread the word through channels other than
HN.

Heck if it is good enough, it'll be re-posted on Reddit and HN like everything
else always is.

~~~
minimaxir
Social channels only work if you have sufficient reach on your social
channels. If you have less than a couple thousand followers on both, then it's
the equivalent of a tree falling in a forest.

------
brianbarker
Put "show HN" on it. After they added the special feed for that the other day,
everyone was hacking that and there were about 7 on the front page for awhile.

Ironically, this post is sticking on the front page :). Maybe that says
something about negativity in the nerd world. Then again, maybe not.

I do have to say, though, that only a true nerd would feel some sort of
failure by not getting to the HN front page. Jesus still loves you.

------
smoyer
"IMO" ... you didn't find any "early adopters" who were cruising the new
postings and agreed with your opinion. Sorry to see that your meta-posting was
deemed more important.

EDIT:

I just checked the "spurned posting" ... it's important to me (and as
described in the linked article, a hard problem to solve).

~~~
dang
> Sorry to see that your meta-posting was deemed more important.

I know what you mean, but wouldn't put it that way. Meta posts are a class of
their own. They're reliably popular.

If we didn't prune them, meta posts would be all over the front page every
day, along with other kinds of reliably popular post that don't fit the
mandate of this site.

------
dang
This post was killed by user flags.

------
Mz
_What now?_

What are you wanting to happen?

~~~
billpg
I meant "What now" as in "What should I do now?"

I've relied on HN so much these dats, I've no idea where else to go.

~~~
Mz
Then perhaps you need to take that as an indication that it is time for you to
diversify your approach here? Or perhaps you need to figure out what went
wrong with the post, learn from that, and do another, better post at some
point.

I am still learning to write good titles and learning other things. Some of my
writing does well here but a lot of it does not get any real notice. It would
be nice if that were different and I am working on improving, so I hope that
changes. But, for now, it is what it is.

