Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

171 points by jannesblobel 151 days ago | 231 comments

When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”

What I find strange is that Hacker News feels oddly opaque. I’ve never met anyone who can clearly explain how it works in practice. Not just the rules, but the dynamics: what’s repeatable, what’s luck, and what actually matters.

By using the Kevin Bacon-number idea: I can usually get within three degrees of separation of well-known technologists like Linus Torvalds, but I can’t seem to get within three steps of someone who confidently understands how HN works.

So I’m asking sincerely: Does anyone here feel they understand Hacker News? If so, what are the real levers, and what do people consistently misunderstand?

PS: This question comes from a mix of genuine curiosity and personal frustration. I’m honestly trying to understand how HN works in practice.

jacquesm 151 days ago |

HN is hard to game on purpose. So stop looking for the levers and participate, that's all there is to it. I've made friends here, have been helped by people on projects that I was busy with, did the reverse, found friends and business partners and spend way too much time. HN is a very interesting slice of the online world, a place that is unlike the rest, sometimes a bit dry but always interesting and extremely useful. If you're looking at it to try to understand it then you might as well try to understand a rat or a mouse. You won't understand it because it isn't there to be understood, it just is, like any other organism.

The root of HN is a thing called 'startup news', that was changed very quickly and since then HN has been a focal point for techies of all sorts but also lots of other people from all walks of life and from a large variety of countries. It isn't 'one thing' to everybody that participates, just like a hammer is a different thing for a carpenter than it is for a masoner or a farmer.

The fact that after being a member for a couple of years you have this question indicates a lack of participation, not a lack of understanding.

noosphr 151 days ago | |

Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.

Its also the currently last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.

You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.

dang 151 days ago | | |

> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies

I should probably clarify this a bit.

It's true that HN sponsors Launch HNs (and Show HNs) by YC startups. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. However, YC would not be funding HN if that were the only reason for it. It's a secondary factor.

Far more important than promoting existing startups is attracting founders who might start new startups. This requires an entirely different strategy than promotion: it requires being interesting enough to attract the right kind of users. That's why the site is organized around curiosity, as I explained elsewhere in the current thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46309399).

For more on this, here are past explanations:

optimizing for curiosity - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

relationship between HN and YC's business interests - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

quietbritishjim 151 days ago | | |

> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.

Everything has a cost. For the web, that's typically monetary or your data and attention to advertisers. I think you're right that the cost of Hacker News is that my participation is lending some (tiny incremental) legitimacy to Y Combinator. It's also costing some tiny amount of my attention, in the sense that I may not have heard of Y Combinator if it weren't for Hacker News. For me personally, that is absolutely fine – but I'm glad you made it explicit so that it's a conscious choice.

[Edit: Of course it costs an absolutely vast amount of my attention :-) but I mean only a teeny tiny fraction of that is "payment" in the sense of noticing that Y Combinator exists.]

jacquesm 151 days ago | | |

> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies.

That's up to you, really, you can just ignore them. I know I do.

> So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.

Probably, or maybe that is just an overly cynical take. If it were as bad as that I can think of a couple of very easy things they could do to improve on that and they aren't so for now I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Note that I'm not particularly impressed by anybody associated with YC except the mods here.

> Its also the last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.

So you're saying there is hope for Haskell?

> You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.

There are some pretty funny instances of such interaction here, the best of which still has me in stitches after more than a decade.

intended 151 days ago | | |

Theres 3 (4?) horse men of online communities.

1 Identity topics, eg: Politics/Religion

2 Insufficient moderation

3 NSFW content

4 Inability to distinguish experienced commenters or valid content from plausible sounding content. I.E. Low Subject Expertise thresholds.

4 is what keeps a community boring, while keeping the SNR high.

yakbarber 151 days ago | | |

Reddit is significantly more popular/successful than HN even for tech.

HN is its own little world and that’s fine.

TomasBM 151 days ago | |

First two sentences are key. The reason why HN is so much better than other fora (IMO) is that the mods don't allow lever-pulling and astroturfing to overtake regular contributions. Yet it's also popular, so you're bound to get some activity on most posts.

Sure, it can be frustrating if you're trying to promote a product or farm karma on posts. But the fact that mostly nobody cares about karma means that you can post something and have it be evaluated on its technical, economic, social merits.

Obviously, there are caveats to this - i.e., anything US- and FAANG-related is bound to get much more activity than otherwise - but the overall atmosphere of HN is refreshing compared to Reddit.

nobodywillobsrv 151 days ago | | |

How do you know they don't? How can you show this? It's fine if it's just vibes but just want to know what is known and can be said.

dang 151 days ago |

(I'm a mod here)

It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks.

But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are links to past explanations about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

We try to elevate things that gratify curiosity: creative work, surprising discoveries, deep dives, technical achievements, unusual personal experience, whimsical unpredictability, good conversation, etc. And we try to demote things that run against curiosity, especially repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion.

It gets complicated because you'll also see plenty of repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion on HN—alas! This is the internet after all. But the site survives because the balance of these things stays within tolerable ranges, thanks to two factors: an active community which cares greatly about preserving this place for intended purpose (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html); and an owner (Y Combinator) that pays us to work on the site full time and mainly just wants us to keep it good, to the extent possible.

If you really want to figure this place out, the way to do it is as a reader. Hang out on the site, look at the mix of articles that make the frontpage, spend time in the discussion threads (hopefully the interesting sectors and not the flamey ones!), and over time your eyes will adjust.

What doesn't work—and this is good because we want it not to work—is approaching HN as a platform for promoting content. If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, but anyone) mainly care about "how can I use this thing to get attention for my startup/blog/project/newsletter", then you're operating in 'push' mode rather than 'pull' mode (or 'idle' mode, which is even better). In that case you won't be curious because you're too focused on what you're wanting for extraneous reasons—and if you aren't in a state of curiosity, this place won't make sense. At least we hope it won't!

MathiasPius 151 days ago |

It sometimes blows my mind how questions which essentially boil down to "How do I best manipulate you for personal gain?" can be asked in such an unabashed fashion.

nacozarina 151 days ago | |

Hello, fellow nerds! How do you recruit other nerds? They mostly seem to be into their own thing. How can I energize engagement?

robot-wrangler 151 days ago | | |

> They mostly seem to be into their own thing. How can I energize engagement?

You jest, but the best way is to give the nerds only a feed and don't allow any other organizing principles for navigating the content. Lured by the promise of something interesting sometimes, people who are trying to follow their curiosity for math/archaeology will stumble into threads about corporations and products, throw ideas out in public for free, get sucked into politics, etc etc

ThrowawayR2 151 days ago |

> "When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: 'Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.'" ... "If so, what are the real levers, and what do people consistently misunderstand?"

There are no "levers". People come to HN to discuss nerdy topics and those that have come to HN to help make those discussions more informed and interesting are welcome. Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately. And we are certainly not here to be a gauge of interest to any investors.

The one semi-exception is Show HN, which is intended to showcase something interesting that users can play with. There are separate specific guidelines for Show HN submissions (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and tips from the site moderators (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638). Do note that among the tips is the following "Drop any language that sounds like marketing or sales. On HN, that is an instant turnoff. Use factual, direct language. Personal stories and technical details are great." If you have questions about the guidelines or tips, the site moderators can be reached through the email on the contact page linked at the bottom of the page.

antognini 151 days ago |

I've found that there can be a lot of randomness for what makes the front page. Not too many people read the "New" page and articles drop off it pretty quickly, so it can be hard for a niche article to attract the handful of votes it needs to appear on the front page. (Though there is a "second chance" feature which helps to ameliorate this issue.) So there's a lot of randomness to what makes it onto the front page.

For instance I submitted an article three times (spaced a year apart). The first two times the article got no upvotes. The third time it got 600+ and hit the top of the front page. It's just a matter of who happens to be looking at the New page at the time.

Imustaskforhelp 151 days ago | |

I've found that there is a snowball effect too

If someone has less votes and its still something I find interesting, I am more critic of the whole situation to upvote

But if someone already has 400 upvotes and is on the top of the site, I will look more into it with ("woah a lot of people upvoted, lets see why" and then read the comments and some of the comments are really brilliant that it becomes the reason why I upvote the post itself too

I am sure that hackernews doesnt really recommend it but I do feel like its something that I do subconsciously that I have observed and wanted to share. It does feel like random stuff but still in a way which still makes sense for the whole ethos of hackernews.

Animats 151 days ago |

It works because it discusses important things that are of interest to reasonably smart people. The top 5 items right now.

- Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

Ah, progress on cancer. But in mice, where lots of things work but don't transfer to humans.

- What Is an Elliptic Curve?

A core concept in modern cryptography which I don't understand. The article helped.

- Learn Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Only HN would put something like this near the top of of the forum.

- Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

This week in LLMs. Have to keep up.

- OBS Studio Gets a New Renderer

They're using Apple's Metal for talking to the GPU? How does portability work? OBS runs on Linux and Windows, too, but Metal runs only on Apple machines.

These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things.

lukan 151 days ago | |

"These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things."

I would argue Gemini is popular and commercially interesting, but yes, mainly it is a curious topic, whether one is invested in the current hype, or not.

robot-wrangler 151 days ago | |

> These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things.

This is not really your average front-page at the moment, and in fact it feels significantly more geared towards curiosity and less towards commercial interests compared with the usual. Partly because it's the holiday slow down but you see the same effect on weekends, which is telling. And IMHO hacker news is consistently more curious when America is sleeping.

HN desperately needs tags, which would serve everyone well, whether you're really here for curiosity or for all the corporate news. I'd really like to be able filter out most of the stuff for "working professionals" even if it is still legitimately technical (for example the recent docker and github news). What I usually want is all the hobby tech / PLT / open-source / science / learning-oriented stuff that's left over after that filter. I can imagine various reasons why forcing a "feed" style front-page is advantageous to some people.. but let's just say it's not about promoting curiosity.

anigbrowl 151 days ago |

Do you mean 'how do get a Show HN project to earn a lot of votes'?

Be somewhat novel, communicate very clearly (particularly what is' for and why you might want to use it, even if that seems obvious to you) and post around mid-morning PST so people can goof off from work to 'research' your interesting new thing.

al_borland 151 days ago |

If there were “levers” for people to pull to game the site, it would lose all its value and turn into nothing but low-effort self-promotion. I won’t claim to understand everything about HN, but I know that is not in the spirit of the site.

baubino 151 days ago |

This post makes me feel really old.

HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.

Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as opposed to communicating to promote or to manipulate or to drive traffic or to pull any number of other “levers”) is exceedingly a thing of the past.

nospice 151 days ago |

A good portion of it is just pure chance. There are relatively few people patrolling new submissions, and if something doesn't get a couple of upvotes in the first hour or so, it just disappears down the memory hole. So, you'll sometimes lose even if your content is good.

Another part of the equation is topic and tone. There's no sophisticated algorithm, but it's an eclectic forum, so if your post sounds like pure marketing or self-promo, it will probably not make it far. You need to offer something of value to readers, not to you.

An interesting quirk of the system is that people who upvote or comment on stories don't necessarily read them. A lot of HN discussion boils down to people reacting to the prompt in the subject line. There are publications that learned how to game this. I don't think it's a template worth following, but it sells...

firexcy 151 days ago |

Shameless plug: I wrote this as I tried to understand HN: https://hsu.cy/2025/09/how-to-read-hn/ (Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45331030 ) I know it only scratches the surface, but hopefully it can provide some basics.

Areibman 151 days ago |

I've found this list of "undocumented rules" to be useful https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

d--b 151 days ago |

Ok. So you'd like to promote: https://www.legitcontrol.com/ (at least you'll get your link in one comment here, no need to thank me ;-))

A system that somehow allows you to tame AI agents' unruly use of git (is that it?)

I see you did use Show HN, and that didn't work.

What you could have done is email hn@ycombinator.com telling them that your Show HN is not being upvoted. This happens, and usually dang and others mod will take a look and if you're within the guidelines will give it a small boost so it shows up in the main Show HN page. Then you're on your own.

Make sure your catchphrase, or hook is well written, cause most people here will not read past "Make Agents a Safe Collaborator in your App".

Anyways, as others said here. There are no ways to "game" HN. the closest you will manage is what you just did, basically asking for help...

That's the key, ask for help, and people will respond. People are nice, and they are willing to procrastinate their intellect away for free.

lovich 151 days ago |

The forum tries to not be gameable. If it’s in its ideal state then it works when you have something that is legitimately interesting to the community, although it’s up to the interpreter to decide how well that works.

The only really opaque thing I’ve found is the anti spam/anti flame war rules but it’s not crazy to keep those secret and I say that as someone who gets temp banned by those rules on here frequently

edit: oh, you should also go to your profile and set showdead to `yes` if you want to see the unfiltered forum. You'll get about 10% controversial opinions and 90% green name accounts posting spam.

Ah and if the poster's name is green in your browser it means they are a very new account

popalchemist 151 days ago |

If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

HN is not a nail. Stop trying to hit it.

sylware 151 days ago |

What I know: the karma system is broken, because it is very hard to provide a controversial opinion/fact without being mass de-karma-ed.

For instance, there is serious hate here about web interop with classic noscript/basic (x)html browsers (namely basic HTML forms with at best <video> <audio> elements, optional simple CSS, often a document which is a "semantic" 2D html table with proper ids for navigation, encrypted URL parameters are your friends).

And AIs...

pedrozieg 151 days ago |

Investors talk about HN like it’s a growth lever, but the site mostly behaves like a long-running reading habit with spam defenses. A tiny slice of users on /new decide whether you even get a shot, gravity slowly pushes old stuff down, there’s a “second chance” queue for posts that looked promising but died early, and moderators occasionally hand-tune obvious mistakes. Beyond that, it’s just a bunch of curious people clicking what looks interesting.

The only repeatable “strategy” I’ve seen work is: write things that would be interesting even if HN didn’t exist, and let other people submit them. Trying to treat HN as a distribution channel (carefully timed posts, optimized titles, orchestrated upvotes) reliably backfires because the software + mods are explicitly optimized against that. If you treat it as a weird little newspaper run by nerds for their own curiosity, the dynamics suddenly make a lot more sense.

bookofjoe 150 days ago | |

>If you treat it as a weird little newspaper run by nerds for their own curiosity

That's my favorite phrase of this entire thread, which I'm reading in its entirety.

gurghet 150 days ago |

I once published an opinion piece about how I thought Object Oriented Programming has problems and is overrated. I got 0 comments. Than I changed the title to the clickbaity "OOP is dead", floods of comments.

wltr 151 days ago |

Have you considered that what you could hear from others, some of those people can be not smart? I know that’s not the reply you seek. But still an input. Sometimes, I think overanalysing something stupid makes quite little sense.

Answering the question directly, I think I understand how news.ycombinator works. It is affiliated with the parent domain, and hence it serves their agenda. As simple as that. It’s not some non-profit entity that owes you something. While I have issues with things like censoring, I understand they owe me nothing. Basically, they _allow_ me to be part of the community, if I behave.

csomar 151 days ago |

It is not clear what exactly you are looking for?

> “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”

From my experience, both HN and Reddit have the worst traffic. I got "tens of thousands" of visitors from both with exactly zero conversion. I am now getting a few hundreds a month from Google and other sources and the conversion rate is roughly 20-25%. So pretty much not worth it to pursue HN/Reddit for your startup though your mileage would probably vary.

I'd use HackerNews for what it is, a news site for casual/mixed information with sometimes interesting discussions. You could have much better levers in other places.

asim 151 days ago |

To echo what dang said in the thread. It's a place to hang out and learn about new things. Or sometimes old things. It's news, it's history. All with a tech skew. I've had this account since 2008. In that time I've used it in many different ways, including getting stuff onto the front page. Honestly trying to game it doesn't work. Post something people genuinely find interesting and it will make it to the front page and in the case it doesn't sometimes the mod will see that and think it should get another shot.

npodbielski 151 days ago | |

HN is great for that stuff. Though I genuinely lack a good site with just developers news. HN is not that. I was using Code Project for that but it gone bankrupt. Other dev news sites seems to be closer to facebook with AI generated articles than to actual interesting development stuff.

asim 151 days ago | | |

Yea its a mixed bag. I think some people like https://lobste.rs and there's always https://dev.to. But if that doesn't work there's also infinite sub-reddits on Reddit or classically tailoring your own RSS feed using Feedly or similar. I got to that place where I've curated my source of news but it's by category; Crypto, Dev, Finance, Islam, Politics, Tech, UK, World. I've got a feed for each and it's all grouped in a single UI like this https://mu.xyz/home

internet2000 151 days ago |

Please don't try to game the algorithm here.

yen223 151 days ago | |

The trick to gaming the algorithm here is to post interesting original content that software-focused people like to read

Don't tell the mods!

PaulRobinson 151 days ago | | |

Broadly true, but I think we can let the hardware-focused people in now and again, even if they do make an awful noise as they drag their knuckles along the floor :)

beachy 151 days ago | |

Or do, so that weaknesses can be identified and fixed.

maxbond 151 days ago |

Sounds like analysis paralysis. Read posts here, pay attention to what this audience expects, and then post your work. If you really want to find a source on this topic Michael Lynch (mtlynch) wrote a book called Hit the Front Page of Hacker News and you can find it if you search for it (I haven't actually read it), but I think spending an hour a week reading HN and asking yourself why a piece of writing did or didn't work for this audience would be more worthwhile.

bookofjoe 150 days ago | |

https://hitthefrontpage.com/

echelon 151 days ago |

This is what the whole internet was like from 1995 - 2005.

saidnooneever 151 days ago |

HN works like this. you can post something and if people have something to say they can comment. if you make the title accurate its more appreciated than making it cool. if people like what you did it will 'take off'. i dont think there's much other than that which i think makes it appealing.

there might be people that try to get more out of it somehow, but i dont think it 'works like that'

tsoukase 151 days ago |

For me HN still maintains the impact it had when I visited it by chance in the middle of 2018:

- how wonderful and productive threads! All of them

- how simple, light and ad free UI

- where are forums of similar quality about other subjects? (never found any)

- how tf I hadn't stepped on it before, while I was losing years in places like Facebook, reddit etc?

Through participating at HN I learned to be thoughtful, humble and most importantly I feel a member of HNers!

rolph 151 days ago |

generally politics, and religion, are topics not amenable to prolonged discussion, and slide into hostile disagreement.

use prefixes [Tell HN: Ask HN: Show HN:] and suffixes [ [PDF] [video] [1995] ] where needed.

be a human being, dont repost, or post promotional materials for adspace, cultivate a nuts and guts discussion for any project you promote rather than a sales ad.

voidfunc 151 days ago |

Theres a whole cottage industry of marketing folks that work on gaming HN. Its a system like any other.

krapp 151 days ago | |

Yes. HN was created as "Startup News" by a Silicon Valley startup incubator and plenty of people here make gaming visibility a central part of their strategy for promoting their startup or promoting themselves as thought leaders to YC. I think the young'uns call it "aura farming."

A lot of the rest are people who work in SV or are startup entrepreneurs who want HN to be nothing more than a tech news and startup forum. These are the people who downvote anything they consider "nontechnical."

HN has a lot of good content and discussion, but it would be naive to pretend there aren't business interests at play on HN, and that everyone here is operating in good faith. Even though the guidelines require it.

NicoJuicy 151 days ago |

The algorithm was shared in the past. The scoring is pretty simple tbh

- the older it is, the less score

- the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score

- penalties reduce the score ( eg. By moderator)

How it works for the end-user:

- People browsing in newest, make it visible in the main page.

- Most people see the main page

Result: interesting topics go to the main page

retsibsi 151 days ago | |

> the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score

Unless this has changed, I don't think comments contribute positively to the score. Apparently they (used to?) contribute negatively if there are more comments than upvotes and the number of comments exceeds some threshold. See e.g. this very old article: https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall...

> In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this.

NicoJuicy 150 days ago | | |

Yeah, you're correct

themafia 151 days ago | |

Additionally: Time of day and day of week seem to matter.

NicoJuicy 150 days ago | | |

That's more about the competition and people online. Not about the scoring mechanism

StanislavPetrov 151 days ago |

One of the real levers is that if you get randomly and inexplicably locked out of your Google account and your whole life/business is destroyed, posting on Hacker News might be your only chance at redemption.

ares623 151 days ago |

The forum is a harsh mistress

bookofjoe 150 days ago | |

https://imgur.com/a/kB7MeDz

pavlov 151 days ago |

What I find strange is that life feels oddly opaque. I’ve never met anyone who can clearly explain how it works in practice. Not just the rules, but the dynamics: what’s repeatable, what’s luck, and what actually matters.

jeffclax 151 days ago |

I literally just found out about this website today. I am also having a hard time comprehending what is actually going on here. Like how do you post an ask vs show?

araes 150 days ago | |

"Show HN: Title_of_Post" with a URL to the site to post a Show HN article. Should be "something you've made that other people can play with."

"Ask HN: Title_of_Post" with a question written in the "text" section to post a Ask HN article. Should be a text based question for the community (much like this article currently being commented on).

Link to FAQs, Hacker News FAQ[1], Hacker News Guidelines [2], ShowHN Guidelines [3], Y Combinator FAQ / Legal Terms of Use [4], Y Combinator About [5]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

[4] https://www.ycombinator.com/faq

[5] https://www.ycombinator.com/about

Guidelines, FAQ, and Legal are available as links at the bottom of the website.

One feature that's not included in the lists some people have made that I find helpful occasionally is the "by: username" in the Search feature which will find comments and submissions (filterable by Ask, Show, Launch, Job, Poll) by a specific author. These can also be found with quick links using "/threads?id=username" (comments) or "/submitted?id=username" (submissions). Such, as your personal, and obvious relatively limited contributions are:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jeffclax

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jeffclax

ivanjermakov 151 days ago |

Key ingredients of a successful HN story are effort, passion, and curiosity.

Without effort, anyone can do it. Without passion, it's just work. Without curiosity, it's not hacking.

KellyCriterion 151 days ago |

New Job discipline born: "Hacker News Visibility Consultant Services", like there are companys optimizing your position in the app stores :-D

ChrisMarshallNY 151 days ago | |

[Laughs nervously]

I bet that this isn’t an exaggeration. Being highly-ranked on HN can probably give a startup a huge advantage, in the hype department.

I guarantee that LLMs are currently being feverishly trained on HN front pages, for the last few years, and we’re gonna be seeing “link farm” sites, specifically designed to rank high on HN.

I enjoy it here. I don’t hang out on any other social media, so this place gets a lot of my time (I’m writing this right now, as I’m working up some tired, to go back to sleep). I’ve spent my entire life, hanging around people that intimidate and inspire me, so this place feels like home.

If it turns into a Dead Internet site, I’ll probably pack it in. I have left a number of sites, over the years. It would make me sad, as I’ve lasted longer here, than anywhere else.

Most of my karma is from comments, not submissions. I like to engage.

araes 150 days ago | | |

There's a bunch of LLMs. Not actually that difficult to find.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

There's even some pretty obviously shady ones doing stuff like purposefully evading LLM detection systems.

It also does not take that much of a search online to find people trying to buy upvotes, comments, accounts. A lot get banned, yet people are still obviously trying.

Generally agree with you. Lot of sites over the years that have eventually been turned into wastelands. Predictabot LLM SEO spew that eventually rendered interacting there meaningless. The auto-comment, auto-review stuff has been around longer than the LLM idea, it just wasn't quite so accessible. Now its like every teenager has been handed bioweapons.

Unfortunately, (opinion) most of the mainline World Wide Web has been reduced to content that's difficult to parse from Stock Market summary bots, and most of the old vibrant forums have slowly been obliterated, so there's not that many places to go to.

Huge portion of the World Wide Web that just goes from site to site ruining the experience until there's nothing left, and no reason to participate, or even glance. Their calculations wasted turning each "platform" into a pile of vomit no-one wants to interact with.

bookofjoe 150 days ago | | |

>I’ve spent my entire life, hanging around people that intimidate and inspire me, so this place feels like home

Best sentence of the day

iwanttocomment 151 days ago |

You post the thing.

The HN audience upvotes it or downvotes it or flags it or ignores it.

From the reaction, you get an impression of the reception of the thing.

That's... it.

edent 151 days ago |

Do you want to know a secret?

Sometimes my friends post on social media platform A "Hey, I've just posted on platform B. Upvotes appreciated."

Or a newsletter will say "please share this post on…"

Or people on Discord / Slack / Matrix will say "people are being mean to me on platform C, where are my defenders at?"

HN feels organic - and is pretty well moderated - but it isn't immune to family & friends giving something an initial boost.

But if no one wants to discuss it, the post will falter.

As for the other levers, it is hard to say. Sometimes the posts I've worked hardest on with the most detail just die a death. But the half-finished thought casually tossed off will Do Numbers. Outrage sometimes works, but it is a fickle friend to tame. Catchy titles aren't clickbait (despite what some people say) but they work best when they are descriptive.

And, finally, people can and do resubmit stuff. What doesn't work at 0900 Monday will be popular at 1700 Tuesday. Why? That's just the way it is.

In the end, it is all luck. But, as the saying goes, the harder you work the luckier you get.

tptacek 151 days ago | |

The opposite thing is true in my experience. We write a post and immediately warn our friends not to upvote it, because none of us know how the ring detector works, but we're pretty sure it's hair-trigger. I don't think stories get to the top of HN by being voted up by friends.

rramadass 151 days ago |

Is this some kind of a "Reflexive Control" Psyop ?

How much is it worth for you to know ? ;-)

Dolpheyn 151 days ago |

The round table has no levers

le-hu 147 days ago |

HN is a forum, what is there to understand?

elcapitan 151 days ago |

Hackernews SEO agency when?

politelemon 151 days ago |

I think I can safely say that nobody understands ~~quantum~~ hacker news

aj_g 151 days ago |

The answer is in the name. The word 'hacker' used to more refer to someone who is a tinkerer, diy engineer, curious about how systems, components, etc work. Hacker News is still somewhat true to this ethos, what's popular here aligns with this old-school curiosity mindset. Of course the exact interests of the userbase has changed over the years, but if you spend a lot of time on this forum you eventually understand some of the common themes that get the minds of the hackers turning.

Unfortunately due to the enshittification of things people are conditioned to see HN as something to be gamed and leveraged for personal gain now, but in general it's algorithm-less enough, the the mods are strict enough, (thank god) that the type of content here stays pointed towards the original 'hacker' ideals.

JojoFatsani 151 days ago |

It’s just a a forum

dizhn 151 days ago |

Are you talking about this website or Ycombinator?

manuelmoreale 151 days ago |

Years ago I wrote [0] about the lessons I learned by reaching the front page of both HN and Product Hunt and honestly, all these years later, the only thing I can confidently say is that I don't know shit. Sometimes people posts here things I wrote and for one reason or another they gain traction.

I personally have no clue why and I kinda like it. Like probably many others I come here to find interesting content and have interesting conversation because there are a lot of genuinely interesting people on this site.

But if you're trying to minmaxing your presence on HN, well good luck.

[0] : https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/what-i-learned-by-being-1...

satisfice 151 days ago |

For years I thought that Hacker News has no moderators. Apparently it does, but they seem to keep a low profile. I have no idea what their protocol is and I don't see any help menu that mentions them.

I found out, the other day, that if you post too many comments in too short a time (also undocumented) your final comment is deleted (sorry, you just lose it) instantly with a somewhat snarky message about how you post too much.

I am a little mystified about what community Hacker News serves. It doesn't seem to be the kind of hackers I grew up with (fiercely skeptical, a la 2600 magazine), because, as one example, skepticism about AI or self-driving vehicles is generally downvoted.

Not so much Hacker News as Next Shiny Toy News.

Even so, I know of no better way to discover interesting tools and trends than Hacker News.

kevin061 151 days ago |

I think it is quite simple. Hacker News. News for hackers. Not in the "hacking" Hollywood sense of computer crimes (although there's some of that, too), but in the sense of intellectual curiosity.

Probably more than 70% of your post's impact will come from a catchy headline. People will be curious about your headline, and click through. And then, upvote if they find it interesting.

If the post is interesting but the headline isn't, then, well, bad luck.

Once a post gathers enough momentum, it goes to the front page. Then, there are a thousand bots on Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc, that repost articles that got to the front page, and it gathers even more momentum from a large portion of technologists that don't have an HN account but follow these bots.

AuthAuth 151 days ago |

I'm new to HN so I am just taking a guess based on what i've observed so far.

HN works by posting things you are genuinely interested in and that the other people here are genuinely interested in.

You have to be honest, people arent interested in your chatgpt wrapper or whatever flavour of the month tech is being pushed. There is more interest in someone showing off an pi project they spent a few weeks working on than someone showing a fully working ready to ship product.

So show us the product in a real and interesting way. If you are working on an app dont just post a link to the web page with some SEO slop written, write a blog where you talk about how you solved a specific technical problem.

RGamma 151 days ago |

You're going on my block list, son.

axegon_ 151 days ago |

I've had mixed feelings about HN in terms of how people perceive a product over the last few years. I used to have an overwhelmingly positive opinions about the community up until COVID: everyone started making the "solution that will help researchers find a cure", which, in all instances, ended up being tons of people independently loading up papers into elasticsearch. And when I pointed out that they are all solving a problem no one has, I got jumped by a ton of people going "nooooo you just don't understand how powerful what these systems are". At the end, none of those turned out to be the silver bullet, or a bullet for that matter.

Recently it's the AI craze: you have a complex problem to solve: "AI can easily do that". You have infrastructure issues: "AI can easily do that". You have issues processing petabytes of data fast and efficiently: "AI can easily solve that". I am getting a ton of bots trying to access my home network: "AI can easily solve that". I am having a hard time falling asleep: "AI". I have a flu: "AI".

In a nutshell, the shiny new toy syndrome is very common so the reception of a product is not a guarantee for success. To give you an example: recently some people(pretty active on here) got in touch with me with regards to an initiative I am a part of: they claimed that they wanted some expertise on the subject I agreed to schedule a call. It turned out to be a sales pitch for yet another product which tries to solve a problem but it does not because the people who built it fundamentally do not understand the problem. Forget the fact that I am not interested in being their client, given that it's a volunteer project and none of the people involved are paid to do it(if anything, we are paying from our own pockets to keep it alive), it was yet another techbro product which tries to build a skyscraper starting from the roof. Except the ground underneath is partially lava, partially a swamp.

I think it is all related to the impostor syndrome: young people have it, they get a bit older and gain confidence. By the time people hit their early to mid 30s, they start realizing that most of the world operates on patches over patches and 2 layers down, no one has a clue what is going on.

aristofun 148 days ago |

I think the big part of why HN is so cool and hard to game is that real people are behind it that show up every day to make it work. Not robots (literally and metaphorically).

No corporate bullshit, no scaling strategies, no ai gimmicks and algorithms to raise revenue, just good old “make something people want”.

I assume your frustration is by design. It’s not a marketing channel.

sph 151 days ago |

I made a Show HN once, for my project. It provided a lot of eyes, users, and useful comments. But as it often happens, the first time I posted it it got lost into the cacophony and no one cared. I reached out to the mods, asked if I could qualify for the second chance pool [1] and my project had, finally, a chance in the spotlight.

Hacker News is too large. There's too many people and honestly not many hackers. The voting system is silly. What rises to the top is the common denominator, not what is truly interesting to any niche.

Another thing to know: a post with too many comments vs upvotes will be sent to the shadow realm. This is claimed to help deal with hot-button topics, but I've seen many interesting post that suffer the same fate because people have a lot of interesting things to share. I've seen it happen on a post about Forth of all things, with the greybeards coming to chime about something few care about, and it got hidden pretty quickly. Given the numbers, this will be the fate of your post as well.

Only dang knows how this place works. You can get an inkling of its working by being here a while and piecing it together from his comments.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

bookofjoe 150 days ago | |

>Only dang knows how this place works

Best comment of this whole thread

renewiltord 151 days ago |

Yeah bro. If you go to YC and do well enough they'll tell you. They'll put you in the second chance pool. They'll tell you not to upvote from the profile page, or from a direct link to the YC story page.

But the reason they won't tell you is that the entire reason it works is because you don't know.

cainxinth 151 days ago |

Things HN likes (in my experience):

- Reverse Engineering (legacy code analysis, hardware teardowns)

- Bug Post-Mortems

- Systems Internals (database engines, kernel scheduling, compiler edge cases)

- Retro-Computing

- Infrastructure History

- Obscure Museums / Web Archives

- Convivial Tools (right to repair, privacy first)

- Intellectual Curiosities: (biological quirks, niche economies)

- Neologisms (enshittification, context engineering)

onion2k 151 days ago |

When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”

Unless you're building a start up where the potential customers are specifically HN and Reddit readers, get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots.

As lovely and wonderful as the readers of HN and Reddit are, being loved on HN or Reddit means essentially nothing. People here are the magpies of the internet - we love seeing the new shiny thing but that does not tell you it will be a success with the people who might want to buy it. For every Dropbox posted here there are hundreds of Show HN posts that didn't really go anywhere despite having tons of very positive commentary.

If you want to show investors that your start up's product has potential post about it where your customers go and get feedback from people who might give you their money. If you really want to prove your start up has potential, sell to those people and actually get their money. If you can get a sale based on your prototype/proof-of-concept/MVP product that is worth more than a million "Yeah, looks ace, I'd buy that if it was <price that's far too low>." posts from us.

FergusArgyll 151 days ago |

If you can write a blog post like https://ciechanow.ski/ you will get upvotes.

Good luck, looking forward...

bicepjai 151 days ago |

It’s disappointing that a normal democratic forum run is alien to folks. Of course, there are moderators as we cannot expect everyone to behave :)

dogemaster2032 151 days ago |

A significant aspect of HackerNews is driven by its liberal bend. Don’t say anything that might offend their sensitivities, and you may not be shadow banned. Please don’t say “Trump,” or they will get triggered.

wisty 151 days ago |

Bad: "I wrote a web app"

Good: "Why I used Postgres to write a web app"

imvetri 151 days ago |

Writers.

Money. A spot as US citizen to get into startup school.

Money. An investment from a noble mind to another noble mind.

Money. Pass information to fellows at YC (who are from a different domain, see YC as a cool place) they crowd and promote (seems organic)

Money. Well, then the product or the tech fades, because its a bloatware.

They retry the same thing again with next batch of people. Keeps the forum running. The maintainers get retired or really tired.

Readers. I have seen this one before. Reader. Well, now, you are old

kergonath 151 days ago |

This question seems very strange, because it’s really not difficult to understand how it works. You submit, people vote if they like it, but mostly ignore it, and occasionally flag it. Stories that generated interests rise, sometimes to the point where they end up in the front page. Stories that generate too much unwanted interest (e.g. that look too much like flame wars, or like never-ending discussions that go nowhere) sink to the bottom. There are corner cases and you won’t get the exact algorithm, partly because human moderators intervene as well.

If there is one thing to note, it’s that obvious self-promotion is not good. Technical details are more interesting than sales pitches.

Traubenfuchs 151 days ago |

It‘s clearly manipulated/curated, you can tell my some absolutely shitty content with zero comments and zero engagement ending up and staying on the frontpage for quite a while.

jacquesm 151 days ago | |

I've been here for a while and that's not a pattern that I recognize, could you point out a few examples? I am fairly sure the mods would love to hear about this as well.

Traubenfuchs 151 days ago | | |

It doesn't look like shit content, but:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46310650

posted an hour ago with 4 measly upvotes among other threads with hundreds of upvotes on spot 10?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311092

4 upvotes in 26 comments, also on spot 10 after refresh?

Still zero comments for both! If all you need to end up in the top 10 is 4 upvotes within 30 minutes I could start selling hacker news front page placements right here, right now.

Is the value of an upvote karma based? Is the ranking view based? Are view by high karma accounts worth more? In any case, those two posts are pretty sketchy. No one cares enough to comment on them and they are still on the frontpage.