

Should you submit to Hacker News? - mayank
http://mayank.lahiri.me/writing/hackernews/index.html

======
pg
It's slightly inaccurate to describe deleting and resubmitting as a loophole,
because we ban people who do this.

~~~
minimaxir
I've noticed people doing that (on days where I check _new_ frequently), so
I've been curious if that's addressed. It's good to know that it is. :)

The annoying thing about that tactic is that there's plausible deniability for
the perpetrator to nonadmins. Well, unless someone is using a Python scraper,
anyways.

~~~
pyre
You're not limited with a Python scraper. Just scrape the comments url, and
pull out the id number. That's unique, even if the story url and title aren't.

------
lqdc13
The main problem with this analysis is that the time on the /newest is not
useful without knowing how many users saw it. Maybe staying up for 5 minutes
on a Tuesday afternoon is better than an hour on Saturday night.

~~~
tikhonj
I assume the main goal is to get onto the front page rather than just maximize
views on the /newest page. I am willing to bet that getting on the front page
at the least active time is still _far_ better than being on the new page at
the busiest time.

~~~
honzzz
If I understand correctly, the determining factor is not the time spent on
'new' page but the number of upvotes. During less busy hours submissions spend
more time on the 'new' page but are seen by less people per unit of time and
therefore get less upvotes per unit of time. The time itself means nothing.
It's about ratio of time on new page to upvotes per unit of time which might
be higher during busy hours. That means that it's not impossible that the
correlation between time spent on new page and probability of getting to main
page is negative.

~~~
jordn
However, to get on to the front page all that is required is that your
'hotness' score (approximately votes/time) is better than most of the
competing stories.

More time on 'newest' -> fewer stories posted. The 'hotness' requirement is
lower. It's also likely that as no major press releases are made during the
off-times that the competition is lower quality.

Less popular posts that might not make it during the week have a better chance
of making it. Now, on a Sunday morning, the top three stories have about 20
upvotes each.

------
donebizkit
I submitted my side project last Tuesday @6am and it drowned within 10 min. I
found a better exposure when I submitted to ASK HN instead. It would be great
if we get the same analysis on the "ask" page. Thanks mayank for sharing your
work.

~~~
Udo
Looking at the ask tab, this _is_ actually somewhat of a loophole people are
using inappropriately. Prime examples on the ask page right now that have
absolutely no business being there:

Ask HN: Invest in Adam | <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688027>

Show HN: Elevatr | <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5690920>

A beautiful self hosted alternative to Basecamp |
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5687765>

Ask HN: Why was the MeteorAtSO twitter account suspended? |
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5686579>

A lot of these are actually Show HNs exploiting the longer lifetime of Ask HN
posts. That said, _I like_ Show HN projects. Having a separate tab for "Show
HN" (similar to Ask) would be nice, giving those projects more exposure.

~~~
23andwalnut
I thought that the title of the post had to start with 'Ask HN:' for it to end
up in the Ask section. One of the posts you linked is actually my project and
I definitely had no intention of being sneaky. Nor was I trying to bypass any
rules. I initially posted it with a "Show HN" title, but it was immediately
marked as spam (for reasons that I still don't understand because I've never
posted to HN before), so I deleted it and asked a friend to submit the project
for me. Neither of us knew that leaving out the url automatically classifies a
post as Ask HN. I've just looked at the submit form again, and I see where
it's written, but it's not immediately obvious that that's what will happen.

~~~
Udo
It's impossible to know the intentions behind every single post, but together
they're a trend and they _do_ tell a story. What is unclear to me is why would
anyone post their Show HN in that gray, de-emphasized text field where URLs
are not even converted into links? Visitors have to actually copy and paste
the URLs into their address bar. That makes absolutely no sense _unless_ there
is another advantage to be gained from submitting text posts (instead of URL
posts).

------
rcfox
For those confused about why you would want to optimize the amount of time on
the /newest page:

I believe it comes from a comment that pg(?) made at some point that once an
article falls off the first page of /newest, it's pretty much impossible to
get on to the front page. I'm not sure if that's part of the algorithm, or
just an observation he was making though.

So, spending more time on /newest means that you have more opportunity to make
it on to the front page.

------
Saavedro
A while back I put together a doodad to collect and plot this sort of data
over reddit (both as a whole and at a subreddit level), see
<http://reddalyzr.com/#/all> The banner is there as I built it as a
demo/dogfooding app.

Right now it only has a few days worth of data in it as the database backing
it got blown up earlier this week.

------
petercooper
I think a real problem is not enough emphasis is put on newest. I suspect not
that many people (relative to the active user base) look at it frequently, so
people end up "encouraging" others to vote up their posts, etc. It'd be cool
if there was a way to encourage people to be exposed to these posts more (I
use the firehose account on Twitter which helps a little, but not much.)

------
JeremyMorgan
I too often see better results when my submissions are in /new/ longer, but
when you do get a "hit" article during the day to hit the front page it gets a
lot more eyes.

As far the delete-resubmit thing, I don't see that a lot, and I highly doubt
it works on a site as technically centered as this one is. Sounds like a great
way to get banned.

------
andrewcooke
one problem is, though, that what people like here may not match what you want
people to read. it's easier to get a rant on the front page than some more
interesting, but technical, article...

------
tyre
This doesn't seem like very meaningful data. So you want to stay on /newest
for the longest amount of time? Submit Sunday night. Well I would venture not
a lot of people read HN on Sunday nights, so what is the purpose of hanging
around their?

The best trick I've seen to staying on the homepage is writing about
interesting things, making novel points, or providing insight to currently
relevant material.

~~~
alok-g
Except that many a times (may I say most of the times actually), things that
are good are still lost without being noticed. A clear proof comes from
someone submitting something that does not get anywhere followed by someone
else submitting nominally the same URL and making it to the front page.

------
jabbernotty
Off topic: The <div id="content"> has a fixed width, a left:50% and a margin-
left:50%, making it difficult to read on smaller screens. In my case, that is
my screen divided in half. It is also difficult to adjust with dev tools (I
sometimes have to do this for readability).

( The post is something I'm very interested in, but I haven't had time to read
it yet :P )

------
dottrap
Hmmm, this went up at about 7pm on Sat. Should have waited a couple of hours
and maybe until the next day ;)

~~~
mayank
Technically, yes :) But I had a beer waiting for me at a bar...

------
clamprecht
Nice analysis. I would love to see an analysis of the title changing behavior.
E.g., the original title, and the title after being edited by the mods.
(Sometimes this happens more than once). In fact, I think I've observed mods
apparently fighting (with each other) over the title.

~~~
mayank
You should be able to examine that by looking at the MySQL data dump. I save
titles as they appear on /newest, indexed by href, so you should be able to
see title editing in action.

------
MasterScrat
Buffer (<http://bufferapp.com/>) should do this to know what's the best times
to post your stories.

They could get great insights as they're gathering data from a multitude of
social platforms and users.

------
fmavituna
There is a better tactic, submit the same page with different random
querystring params. Means, unlimited amount of submissions. Frequently used as
well.

<http://example.com/page/>

<http://example.com/page/?1>

<http://example.com/page/?2>

<http://example.com/page/?3> ...

~~~
JacksonGariety
Until you get banned, yeah.

~~~
fmavituna
I've seen it's used by the top karma users, so doubt it.

------
wes-k
Looks like he posted this around 9pm Saturday night. Glad to see he is using
his own findings.

------
wfunction
> Hacker News does not allow submissions to be downvoted.

I thought it does?

~~~
argonaut
You can only flag submissions. Flagging is meant to be reserved for spam or
other egregious violations, as far as I know, though the "rules" on HN are not
hard and fast. I'll sometimes flag really egregiously link-baity submissions.

~~~
wfunction
Hmm... how do posts die then? By flagging?

~~~
ehsanu1
AFAIK the site itself, and mods (unknown who they are besides pg really) kill
posts at their own whim. Flagging is one signal for that. Of course, you can
just wait for the passage of time, which will "kill" any post on the front
page eventually.

~~~
wfunction
I'm pretty sure I've seen posts pretty much Dead On Arrival though... I don't
think the mods are monitoring the Newest page 24/7?

~~~
ehsanu1
That's what I meant by "the site iteslf", sorry I wasn't clear. There's
definitely some automated spam-detection, and voting circle detection, which
auto-bans some posts.

------
antjanus
Awesome summary. I always wonder if anyone actually took the time to do this.

~~~
bigiain
I am 100% sure there are people who've been running ongoing analysis of this
for at least several years.

(And I'll be very surprised if pg doesn't monitor - and possibly honeypot -
anything that looks like a crawler.)

------
lifeisstillgood
Look the best time to submit a article or idea is _when you are ready to share
the thought_.

If you are relying on extra time on HN front page as your marketing strategy
you have other problems.

If evenings in California is over-represented that's _pg's problem_ as he
tries to grow HN.

Reading this I was tempted for a micro-second to write some script that will
submit when I am asleep - but then I realised if I did that, so would everyone
else and I would have nothing interesting to read when awake.

Now that really would be a tragedy.

~~~
JeremyMorgan
I agree with this 100%. I share stuff from my website and stuff from a lot of
other websites, and I notice when something does well or flops, but since I
have no real vested interest in it, I don't care and don't want to let upvotes
dictate what I share. If I think the HN crowd will like it, and they don't
that's fine, move on. I'm sure those trying to sell something see it quite
differently.

------
recoiledsnake
Great post and analysis. I've been guilty of the delete/submit trick in rare
cases where I believe the story is of interest to HN ;)

Thanks for the MySql dump and the Python code. Any way you can provide the
parsing code as well?

