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How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

(www.indiehackers.com)
414 points muchtest | 3 comments | 13 May 23 16:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.431s | source
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shever73 ◴[13 May 23 16:24 UTC] No.35929887[source]▶
Sorry in advance for the grumpy response, but I hate articles like this and I detest the manipulation of an organic voting mechanism for self-promotion.

I know this is the Internet we have to live with, but this kind of stuff just makes it a worse place to be.

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dmbche ◴[13 May 23 16:30 UTC] No.35929959[source]▶
Well then again, the articles they write and post (seem?) To have value, as they are written "with reaserach, without bs" and on newsworthy subjects...

I see this less as "gaming HN" than "realising what the niche is" and fulfilling the niche. I guess I'm fine with someone posting first about a subject that will be there anyway? Maybe I'm not seeing something.

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1. shever73 ◴[13 May 23 16:39 UTC] No.35930046[source]▶
It’s possible (likely) that I’m not seeing something too.

I read the article in the spirit of the headline, which is basically: we wrote a bot to tell us stuff that would do well on HN so we can shill our/our clients’ stuff. In other words, HN becomes an echo chamber of rephrased news articles recycled into commercial blogspam.

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2. johnchristopher ◴[13 May 23 20:41 UTC] No.35932487[source]▶
Well, contrary to what was written today in a comment I almost replied to [0] it's more hacker news than hacker news [1].

So they didn't really hack HN, they merely provided content HN likes and did at the right time. I wonder if they could hack it more by only providing divisive content that feeds on outrage. That'd bring comments and points but most likely no new clients or conversions.

Oh, and I have a good example of that ! The other days there was a submission about a font from intel designed for visually deficient programmers. I got curious and installed it then I started thinking about ligatures in code, googled a bit and read https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fon...

I found the article interesting and decided to submit it but when pasting the title I thought "uh, with a title like that, there's going to be some strong reactions/opinions" and indeed the top comment thread is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35926574

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927503

>> Can someone explain me why people post links to Wikipedia articles without any context?

> For the exact same reason people post links to other things, it's interesting. It's always been more "hacker" than "news" here.*

[1] It's branding/marketing/groupthink...

3. Brystephor ◴[14 May 23 00:15 UTC] No.35934135[source]▶
What's the problem though?

Basically the trigger for the article is a bot instead of a self generated idea. It doesn't change the quality of the article. And self thought of ideas will usually contain promos of some kind in them.

Also if they're the first to write the article in depth, then they're not the problem. It's the others that are the problem for reposting the same content, right? It seems silly to be upset with someone for posting good content about recent changes because it gets recycled and paraphrased into a new article.