Ask HN: Will Hacker News Get An Official "Show HN" Section? I've just recently joined Hacker News and I think it is a great community, however there is one flaw. While browsing through the "Ask HN" section, I find nearing half of the entries to be "Show HN". I think there are so many people who are now "showing" things to HN, it deserves its own section up top. Does anyone else share this opinion? |
I'm going to bury this thread now. Questions like this are better sent to hn@ycombinator.com.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739559
In the same thread, I wrote up some "in the mean-time" search examples that can help surface "Show HN" submissions:
Of course the same could be said about news articles, however people dont spend hundreds of hours writing a news article (in fact it's rarely even the poster's work at all). While it would certainly be unwise to rely on a Show HN post as the sole means to launch your project, it certainly one of the top 5 traffic generators when you are just getting off the ground, and it sucks when your thread falls into obscurity because you didnt get that one extra vote to move you off of 'New' onto the first page.
Don't get me wrong I am sure you spend a lot of work on your startup but the question I would ask myself is. Did you do a good job with how you market it. In other words did you actually create a product for me to buy?
Your claim:
"Easy predictive modeling in minutes Answer the questions that matter most to your business:"
is kind of vague and your examples
"What will sell best?"
"How much will it pay?"
Etc. simply sounds too good to be true.
Furthermore your visual style works against your claim. Using old b&w pictures confuses however visits the site.
You then follow up with an excel like sheet which means nothing.
So in other words people have no idea what you are actually doing. I don't get a sense of what this product is. Only vague generic claims.
So I would probably spend some more time on making the site more about how your product is solving predictive analysis (whats your claim to fame compared to others using those terms) and re-design the visual side of things (I rarely say this but in your situation it really do need to look quite different)
In regards to the OP, that's just the kind of feedback I was hoping to get from my Show HN post. I think I only had 3-4 arrivals from that page before it dropped of the "New" page into oblivion. Maybe I was just unlucky.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
is for feature requests. There is a link to it at the bottom of most pages on HN.
Maybe just have a link at the top bar/somewhere else to one of the websites other commentors have mentioned that feature all ShowHN projects.
In case anyone's interested, I've put together a project [1] that generates a "Show HN" RSS feed here: http://hnrss.org/feeds/showhn.xml
...thinks like that hold back unofficial filters.
However, I'd strongly suggest it is more like a subreddit than just a filter to only show 'Show HN' posts if possible. It would encourage people to use it but keeping it separate might keep it from overwhelming the more relevant content.
In fact, it's so tricky to sort through the Show/Ask HN archives that I don't often use HN when I want to browse new projects, I use producthunt.com
I'm not sure a "show HN" section would have the same overall value for the community.
Last I heard HN was a community of people who build things. A separate "Show HN" section would allow you know... people to show what they are building. Extend this further, the homepage should be defaulted to "Show HN" and all the rest put onto "other" pages!
I'm not sure I would agree with them being the only thing on the front page, though. There's a lot of other interesting stuff here as well.
But maybe it's "okay" if the people are actually regulars? Hard to say since I'm not a mod here.