Thanks for doing this for all of us who make things. Indifference towards people's side projects and new startup ideas has been creeping into the HN community for the past couple of years and I find it discouraging. Personally, I'd rather read about people's Show HN posts than the latest mainstream news stories that I could find anywhere.
HN Showcase highlights the problem: Hardly any of the Show HN posts get voted on anymore. I think we've become more a community of critics than makers. I haven't even thought about posting Show HN's for my last couple of projects (and my current startup), where 5 years ago that would have been the first thing I did! A cool hack is worth sharing, even if it's not perfect.
EDIT: Actually, if you feel like me and have held back, why not use the comments section of this post to "Show HN" your project. At least in here you'll know everyone cares about side projects and maybe we can all endeavor to give you constructive feedback :)
My favorite part of Hacker News is Show HN. When I see all the awesome projects and startups people are building, I get inspired to work on my own projects.
I launched r/SideProject because there are a lot of great projects and startups that do not get any exposure. It is a subreddit for sharing and receiving constructive feedback on side projects and startups.
Sometimes getting voted on is not enough. Posted a Show HN for BitBalloon yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6285205). Got up-votes enough to go on the front-page, but a few minutes after it hit front-page, it suddenly got booted way down to page 3, and that was the end of it.
Still got some more votes, but nothing could bring it up above #50.
Your submission was probably flagged, possibly by multiple people.
An HN pet peeve of mine is that flagging does not require even a modicum of rationale. I can flag any submission without even the slightest justification. When my own submissions have been flagged, I've also been left wondering "Why?" I understand why many of my submissions have not been upvoted. Many are simply not of upvote-quality. But not upvoting is quite different from flagging.
You may be interested in the HN Slapdown user script [1] which provides insight into articles' scores versus their rank order. With this installed, I tend to look especially at those with red scores because I am interested in counteracting what I believe to be an overzealous application of flagging.
Even right now, this very article has a yellow score indicating that it may be flagged (or something else is affecting its rank order versus its point score).
I personally have only ever flagged one or two articles, and only when I felt that the subject matter had utterly nothing to do with my understanding of the purpose of this site. When I did so, I was shocked at the magnitude of the penalty: if I recall correctly, the article I flagged was instantly dropped from the front page to the third page. It really gave me appreciation for how sparingly one should apply flags.
When I don't find a submission interesting, I just don't upvote it.
So, Tara from YC told me that the problem was that the post set off the voting ring detector.
We don't have anything like a voting ring, but we obviously did tell people about launching BitBalloon in a Show HN. Seems we shouldn't have done that.
This might be a reason ShowHN posts seem to be penalized in general, I imagine it's the norm to tell your friends when you launch a whole new product...
Problems may arise when you send out a direct link to an article. When friends go directly to that article from the URL you provided, that could possible be setting off triggers. Better to just have people search for the post string or just direct to the "New" submissions and scroll down to article. This is only my suspicion, but it seems to be the case based on observations with submission behavior and article ranking.
And I think your idea is even better than what I did!
Medium is nice, but it might be overkill for this - I've just written a self post on HN for this purpose, I'll post it up around 1am PST tonight (don't want to post the same thing twice in a day).
I think it should be like the whoishiring bot, only once a week rather than once a month.
Other thoughts:
- everyone who posts there agrees to comment/give feedback on 5+ other posts
- everyone who posts something must include a backstory to their project (why did they want to build it)
If you have also tried to get feedback on your personal projects on HN without much luck and want to put some input into what this weekly post might look like, feel free to shoot me an email (cjbarber@stanford.edu)
[Also, I realize a bunch of people on HN have tried to do this. Hn for ideas, a bunch of different sites for posting your product betas, etc, not sure what the right solution is but with some collaboration we might be able to tease it out!]
Thank you so much for doing this. If hackernews fails to return to its roots I think it is prime time to create a spinoff community.
I submitted my javascript library last week and was bummed it didn't get upvoted more, even though it was well received on github. I've spent a horrible lot amount of time on it, https://github.com/amark/theory if anybody is interested. And my Twitter account is the same as my username here.
This is great! I want to read more of this, and less about Snowden. Or rather, I want to go one place to read about the tech community's take on Snowden and a different place to read just about things like cool new JS libraries that someone came up with.
Thanks man, really appreciate it. If you want any help building out (if that is the right thing to do) your highlight experiment, please let me know - I'd be glad to help.
I agree, the amount of Guardian articles that have frequented the front page since the 'Snowden Affair' [Almost on a daily basis - some are 'opinion' pieces ] is not what I come to HN for.
I would also argue most of them articles are not within HN guidelines.
Couldnt agree more with this post and love the idea. Im working on a startup right now and have been debating whether to post it on HN glad to see some people feeling what I was feeling. I will be looking out for the weekly post.
At the moment I believe ShowHN posts are negatively penalized by the front page scoring algorithm, something that was setup many many years ago when HN was a completely different community.
Perhaps it's time to reverse that so ShowHN post get positively scored. Also maybe reduce the impact of flagging on ShowHN posts.
These are great, my preferred one is http://skimhn.com. And it's on github so I created a version that shows the latest 50 show hn. It's incredible the quantity of projects that go unnoticed. And then there are some cases like pud showing his new music project and being ignored and after some time putting a link saying he had like 400k users and didn't know what to with them and everybody went crazy up voting it. Sometimes HN is just too far from the target audience.
Honestly thank you for posting that site. I posted a Show HN yesterday. Went to showinghn.com and didn't see my show hn on the site. Turns out I've been banned from submitting links for the past 733 days so their scraper never picked up my show hn because my submission was dead.
edit: off topic, but I was wondering if anyone knew who I could ask to have the hell ban removed on my account? (other than emailing pg)
Thank you so much. Just checked out your profile, congrats on being supported by your own project :)
Not yet, but I believe concentrating them into one post on HN might make it easier for them to be noticed (in many ways pooling the resources of the posts/creators).
Thanks for taking the time to compile this. I had debated with myself whether or not to post my project to HN this week, expecting that either the comments would be very harsh on a v0.0.1 release, or that it would whiz by the "new" feed with no upvotes. Seeing my project, Fortune.js, on this list is very encouraging.
It didn't pick up much traction at the time but I know (as this submission demonstrates) that the issue is one many members of the HN community would like to see addressed.
Part of the issue lies in the fact that HN is essentially a loose collective of special interest groups. Show HN submissions are competing not only with Main stream news (as you suggest) but also the large variety of other submissions ... and visa versa.
I genuinely think that a curated summary (in whatever form it may take, whether that be directory, ezine or podcast) from a couple of interesting people with different opinions would infer so much value to the HN community. Keep posting!
Hi Chris, I agree, underdogs deserve their shot at the title. I actually duplicated the functionality of Hacker News at (www.plantdietlife.com) with an emphasis on plant based diets.
I think one way to address the great idea you're bringing up is to use the code I have produced for PDL (voting algorithm and all) and create another site that's only for peoples personal projects. We can have some sort of verification process where the submissions have to be approved as a "personal project" to be on the home page. Once the item is on the home page we'll demand that it needs a certain amount of comments/likes in order for it to be removed and for the next personal project to appear.
IDK, it's just a quick idea. I look forward to seeing how this vision of yours progresses.
I think the showbot suggestion below is great - and it can be implemented with no extra effort.
So how about a throwaway account, so karma issues are put aside, that posts each Friday evening a thread that anyone can attach their maker projects to - a "MadeByHN" thread?
This is fantastic, thank you for going to the trouble of doing it. I, too, would like to see HN "return to its roots" -- more articles submitted about member projects and YC companies and what they're doing.
> One vote and a comment if they are especially lucky.
Rings pretty true to me; admittedly, I don't participate much in comments or have a recognizable name, but my past submissions certainly fit this bill.
Though, when I look at the 'newest' queue [1], there are 30 posts in the last hour and only one front page. Not everybody can make it. For my part, I'm mostly curious what does, actually, make it.
[off-topic] The text on the page is all exceedingly large, is that intentional? It looks like I'm being served a mobile version on my desktop. I can read the title from 20' away, and the paragraph text from 8'. It only looks "normal" when I zoom to 67%.
Not a huge problem, but it's annoying to the point of distracting to require so much scrolling for so little actual text. Otherwise, I love the idea and the execution.
Thanks for the info! That's certainly their prerogative, and as long as they provide good content it shouldn't matter too much I guess (it's easy enough for me to fix on my end).
I absolutely agree with this. It seemed the initial posting about our events website launch wasn't seen at all or by very few people. But, if this is an appropriate place to re-post, I'd love your feedback! http://planblock.com and like the page at http://facebook.com/planblock
Thanks for the post. I love show HN posts. I wish they fared better.
As an aside, I think your requirement of less than 1000 twitter followers is a bit low. I have a couple thousand followers and I can tell you that it means very little. If I tweet a link to a project of mine I can expect a ctr of about .2%.
HN Showcase highlights the problem: Hardly any of the Show HN posts get voted on anymore. I think we've become more a community of critics than makers. I haven't even thought about posting Show HN's for my last couple of projects (and my current startup), where 5 years ago that would have been the first thing I did! A cool hack is worth sharing, even if it's not perfect.
EDIT: Actually, if you feel like me and have held back, why not use the comments section of this post to "Show HN" your project. At least in here you'll know everyone cares about side projects and maybe we can all endeavor to give you constructive feedback :)