Reverse engineering my #1 Hacker News article(danielwirtz.com) |
Reverse engineering my #1 Hacker News article(danielwirtz.com) |
Sure an off the cuff thought could be an unease with an “guide to going viral on HN” but OP isn’t disclosing any secret hacks or anything from what I’ve read, he just wrote down his creative process and reflected a bit on the virality.
I’m sure a bad actor wanting to go viral on HN could think of this themselves within a days work as well, it’s just a fun article.
But in some way, I hope people don't do that with hn. I sometimes read helpful product reviews on an amazon product. "I tried the XIWSHDX salad spinner, and I found it to be very useful. blah blah."
I think I'm afraid of "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", or possibly will just hide good organic content.
I tried to reflect on some lessons from this, because I learned from the experience that small things (e.g. the title) can make large differences.
Which means that often good ideas or nice articles might get unrecognized, because they lack a good "packaging".
Making sure those things are on point helps.
But that should be it.
"One just needs to write $currentTrendingFad to get the same effect"
Not too long ago it could have been crypto/blockchain, or rewriting $app in $lang
That's the thing of viral is it is just trend following, so recognizing the trend helps the changes of going viral
And by the way, absolutely no hate to the author, I totally get it, and fairly ambivalent to it. It is what it is.
As mentioned in another comment, I think it's sad if one writes an amazing article but it stays unrecognized or gets little traction simply because the title was a bad choice.
But at the same time, we have lived long enough with clickbait to know it works (unfortunately), and this shouldn't become a place where people are lured into low-quality posts.
But, there was one submission I made I knew instantly would be very popular -- The elusive future of San Francisco’s fog -- 152 points, the most by far. Given that many on this forum live, work, or visit SF, and that people everywhere love to talk about the weather, and that SF's fog is an iconic aspect of SF weather, I knew there'd be interest.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37981314 [1] https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/microscope-ast...
I think that unless you want to form a cabal to get something on the front page, there is a great deal of luck in what takes off on HN (and other similar sites). Unless a post quickly gets those all-important few dozen upvotes it will languish on the second or third page wastelands.
It makes me think: we may be living in a golden age when human analysis and thought still produce the most interesting content. Soon AI-assisted content generation processes will take the next evolutionary step: doing proactive analysis and concept development with the human being more like the back seat driver and director.
AI powered writing assistants, music generators, life coaches, etc, will get so good that authentic solo human creation may become a rarity.
(Tangentially, if you ask Perplexity for tips on writing blog posts that are likely to go viral on HN you'll get the above post, only 6 hours old, as a reference)
- https://blog.rmotr.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker-news-...
- https://medium.com/@mi.schaefer/what-is-the-best-time-to-pos...
But the precondition is that you’re submitting high quality content.
At least for this post, I made sure to post it in the afternoon. To have an overall between Eurpean and US time. (I'm based in near Amsterdam)
Hell, even the example article would have probably gotten as much (if not more!) traffic by being titled "you can cross your eyes to solve find-the-difference puzzles".
Stop trying to trick people into reading your content. Write something mildly interesting, and post it.
EDIT: Typo
Otherwise I push it into the future and it never happens.
Happy that I found some time this week.
Not because of ads, not because of bots, but because of HN's ever growing userbase.
People publishing content too niche for Reddit, will start tailoring it for the HN crowd, socially engineering it to be posted here and garner more upvotes. HN's home will mostly become crowded with "artificially" upvoted stuff aimed at funneling the HN crowd into an ad-supported website
For example: Music is not only about how good it sounds. But also a lot about who the singer is. Their history. What they stand for and what story is behind a album or song.
With AI, I don’t see that we will ever reach that dimension. Expect maybe when AI becomes sentient?
So maybe AI in music is just another creative toolset that can be used well or badly. My DAW for music creation has auto mastering powered by AI/ML, it does a good job although not as good as a skilled mastering engineer. AI plugins for music composition in DAWs must already exist, they will inevitably get better and more powerful. So I see it as a phenomenon of AI creeping in to our lives rather than a binary dichotomy.
I do think it's problematic - this whole area of AI disrupting the creative arts, and human endeavor in general. I think it's going to carry on creeping into our human creative processes, as new standards of practice and AI acceptance become the norm. We'll still appreciate live musicianship but we won't completely believe it unless we experience it in a live performance.
I agree, the human perspective will remain crucial. I'm torn between being excited by AI-powered creativity and being turned off by it. I will certainly carry on exploring advanced AI tools for writing, music, visual art, etc. for the time being.
For example, I would love to chat with a bot that has a huge memory and context, like a relationship and collaborator, and to train it over many months of conversations so that it becomes like an authentic extension of my creative brain. Then together we could write some serious shit, I'm sure. I think that in the future there may be books written this way that will come to be considered as great works of literature.
But after I play around with AI tools for some time I think I will get bored and will wish to return to a simpler more organic life. Throw away my phone and pick up a paint brush :-)
But I had never heard of using that same trick to solve puzzles where you find how two pictures differ. And I tried it out and it worked for me.
It took something I had limited application for and turned it into a slightly less limited power. And a great party trick. That’s sort of a superpower :D
In this case though, it's a dude posting on his own blog. I'm fine with whatever title he found cool.
A quick algolia search seems to support that too. Most of the highest voted stories about cryptocurrency and blockchain are negative news and opinions. There are a few highly voted stories about cryptocurrencies and blockchain too, but far fewer.
If you search for something specific like Bitcoin, there looks at a glance to be more positive or neutral stories with high number of votes, and still a few negative ones about that too.
You’ll often find a few positive comments on the stories though, so it’s not like everyone hates it. Not saying that. But overwhelmingly I feel that HN readers as a whole range from disinterested to actively against anything blockchain and that this has been the case for a long time.