I've never succeeded in getting even a single upvote on links I submit. I've stopped bothering, there seems to be no point. It's not the quality of the links either. It just doesn't have a high chance of getting through. I've actually seen links that I submitted land to the front page a day or so later when somebody else resubmitted them. You basically need to get lucky with the right people actually looking at the new section in the few minutes it will be on there. After that it's gone.
One interesting enhancement that would help with that and that also addresses the problem of duplicates is to simply count duplicate link submissions as an upvote on the original. Most popular links have numerous duplicates before and after that did not make it. Some links actually make it to the front page multiple times.
So use the link as a Unique Resource Locator and treat them like the ids they are.
I expected you to have submitted around 100 links without any of them getting traction, but you have submitted three, and complaining that none of them hit the frontpage? HN might be a small place compared to many other social media, but it's not that small, countless of links are submitted every day, and yes, it's not simple to get a story to the frontpage but it's not that hard if it's interesting either. It also depends on what sources you're submitting from, that could have something to do with it, as the submission you've done are not from "popular" domains, so people won't even give them a chance (specifically, I think techcrunch is penalized automatically as they usually have very poor articles).
According to my profile page, I've made almost 200 submissions since Sept 2019, with many of them ending up on the frontpage. Even if the "success" (I wouldn't call hitting the frontpage success even) rate is low, even ending up on the second or third page sometimes yield interesting discussions, which is my main goal with doing submissions to HN in the first place.
> One interesting enhancement that would help with that and that also addresses the problem of duplicates is to simply count duplicate link submissions as an upvote on the original. Most popular links have numerous duplicates before and after that did not make it. Some links actually make it to the front page multiple times.
This already happens. I'm not sure what the threshold in time is, but sometimes I make a submissions and it takes me automatically to a story that is a few days old and adds a upvote to it.
Looking at my current submissions page, last 30 submissions, 8 of them got uptake (which I will say more than 3 upvotes), 5 of them got 15 or more, none of them in the 100s.
Out of the 30 I would also think 5 of them which got 1 or 2 votes each were lower quality submissions - of less interest although still suitable - for example this one "Science Fiction Is Never Evenly Distributed" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30085327 or "Literature-clock: Clock using time quotes from literature" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30044179
many of those that didn't get any uptake I thought were pretty great - like this one "Marie Boulanger on the nostalgic power of typography in The French Dispatch" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130297
There was one that got 52 points that I wondered - should I post this - "Getting to Know the Armed, the Most Unknowable Band in Hardcore" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30082588
In short - HN Submissions sure are a land of contrasts.
on edit: In fact as a general rule it seems the ones of mine that get any significant uptake are because they were added to the second chance pool, not sure if maybe being in Denmark I post during disadvantaged times of the day or something, but that is my general feeling.
There's simply too many things being submitted. Hundred items per hour. Some people treat HN as a bookmark engine or something like that and submit way too much, others self-promote/spam heavily etc.
I noticed often things make it to top of HN after buzzing on Twitter for few hours; perhaps people on HN seeing stuff they already saw on Twitter are more likely to quickly upvote it without reading which lifts it to front page.
However there are a few users whose submissions I see each day on front page and I wonder how they do this.
> However there are a few users whose submissions I see each day on front page and I wonder how they do this.
Some people simply submit a ton of stuff that could be interesting (looking at you tosh [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tosh], who seems to average like 5 submissions/day). I'm also confident that the more time you spend around here, the more you learn about what kind of content HN would like and submit it only if you think it has a chance here. I read a lot of different things during the day, but only half of those things are even worthy of a HN submit, while half of those half would actually have a chance of getting upvoted.
One interesting enhancement that would help with that and that also addresses the problem of duplicates is to simply count duplicate link submissions as an upvote on the original.
That's how it works now. For example, I just submitted the URL for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30160524, and now it's on 2 points with no 'upvote' button next to the link for me.
> One interesting enhancement that would help with that and that also addresses the problem of duplicates is to simply count duplicate link submissions as an upvote on the original.
It does, for a time (a few hours?) after the original submission.
But when you repost a link two hours later on a submission that didn't get any traction, that upvote is meaningless and a new submission with a new chance of traction might have been better.
I just tested it. I picked something[1] off of /newest that was 4 hours old, and created a new submission with that as the link and the same title. It seemed like it submitted, but on closer look, HN had actually just taken me to the old post. The poster was still the previous person, the time was still the previous submission time. Funnily though, it actually upvoted it. I hadn't upvoted it before, but submitting it caused me to automatically upvote the other person's post.
I guess I could try it with different ages if you want.
One interesting enhancement that would help with that and that also addresses the problem of duplicates is to simply count duplicate link submissions as an upvote on the original. Most popular links have numerous duplicates before and after that did not make it. Some links actually make it to the front page multiple times.
So use the link as a Unique Resource Locator and treat them like the ids they are.