What's the best time of day/day of week to submit to HN?

9 points by joshuap 14 years ago | 13 comments

I'm wondering if anyone has noticed any trends regarding feedback and response to links/articles/questions submitted to HN. Completely selfish of course :).

YuriNiyazov 14 years ago |

I once ran a daemon that would hit the frontpage and the new page every 30 minutes over a period of two weeks to answer the exact question you are asking. There weren't any statistically significant trends. Anecdotally, submitting on Fridays is worse than submitting on Mondays.

glimcat 14 years ago | |

"There weren't any statistically significant trends. Anecdotally, submitting on Fridays is worse than submitting on Mondays."

Wait, what?

joshuap 14 years ago | | |

^ what he said :)

jackpirate 14 years ago |

I figure that around noon in the US is the largest traffic, so you will spend less time on the front page as more articles are submitted. But that time is more valuable because more people will see it.

Conversely, if you post at midnight, you will get more time, but the time will be less valuable. So in the end, I think it probably evens out to the same number of users visiting an article.

The trick (not that I'm a big submitter) I would guess is to post things at all hours. I imagine many people have a habbit of only cheching at a certain time. Maybe it's their lunch break, maybe just before going to bed. By posting things at all hours of the day, you can reach all of HN, rather than just the subset that visits only at certain times.

notatoad 14 years ago |

from what i've seen, the traffic on HN seems to be low enough that everything gets a pretty fair shake. things sit in the new queue long enough that no matter when you submit it is going to get seen.

if your submissions aren't doing well, reconsider the content, not the timing ;)

_delirium 14 years ago | |

I think the opposite is generally true--- traffic on HN is high enough that things are very heavily dependent on the randomness of whether it gets 1-3 upvotes in the first 15 minutes, when the submission is still on the top half of the /newest page.

It'd be interesting if we had some empirical data, though.

YuriNiyazov 14 years ago | |

Except when two submissions with different URLs but with same content perform differently.

notatoad 14 years ago | | |

a couple possibilities there:

1) if the first one performs well, people are probably ignoring the second for being a dupe.

2) a source website's reputation, page load times, amount and type of advertising, and site design all factor into the popularity of a submission.

3) luck is a factor. just because something does better this friday night, doesn't mean that every friday night is a good time to submit. the first couple upvotes are crucial, and that's only one or two people - easily within any error margin.

4) maybe i'm totally wrong. this isn't a scientific analysis, just my general perceptions, and i've only actively been reading HN for a couple months.

jackpirate 14 years ago | | |

Probably more a result of different submitters than different URLs?