How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

(www.indiehackers.com)

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nkurz ◴[13 May 23 16:22 UTC] No.35929865[source]▶

Vouched for and upvoted because I think it's important for readers here to see how much effort goes into creating posts that game the system. I think it's better for these strategies to be known than hidden. It will be interesting to see how tactics like this one evolve as ChatGPT use becomes more widespread.

There's a definite tension between the rule of not accusing other users of being shills and the reality that there are quite a few shills out there. I think it a still good rule, but not because it's never right. Rather, the rule is good because the false accusations do more harm than letting some shilling slip by.

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1. jsnell ◴[13 May 23 18:08 UTC] No.35930992[source]▶

>>35929865 #

Right, I'd say that this post has more value than any of the repetitive content marketing these folks churned out for a few years, since it hopefully makes some HN readers a bit more aware that they're being played.

But the interesting question is: why did they write this article?

Is it just that the jig is up, and their one weird trick no longer works as well as it did? Did they get asked to cut it out by the HN moderators? It seems plausible given how many recent submissions to this domain appear to be auto-dead. Do they just think HN readers will forget about this article, and upvote their next bit of content marketing anyway?

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2. muchtest ◴[13 May 23 18:51 UTC] No.35931448[source]▶

>>35930992 (TP) #

Reminds me of the scene with the Mortgage Brokers in The Big Short - "They're not confessing, they're bragging"

3. roenxi ◴[13 May 23 23:13 UTC] No.35933728[source]▶

>>35930992 (TP) #

> ...since it hopefully makes some HN readers a bit more aware that they're being played.

How are they being played? There isn't any deception here. The plan Iron Brands touts is literally "submit interesting articles first". That is what people are trying to upvote.

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4. UncleEntity ◴[14 May 23 02:02 UTC] No.35934678[source]▶

>>35933728 #

Sounds to me like they’re scraping the submission pool and “front running” with their “dog whistle detector” chatbot in order to get people to read their marketing paragraph tacked on to the end of the article.

Providing liquidity to the news market as the quaints would say.

If they were doing original research or scraping the web to bring stuff here, fine, good for them. If all they’re doing is repackaging already submitted articles in order to drive traffic to their website then, IDK?

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5. imgabe ◴[14 May 23 02:24 UTC] No.35934793{3}[source]▶

>>35934678 #

It doesn't sound like they're front-running.

    Fetch data from Hacker News API
    Set up Google Alerts for your query
    Fetch data from Google Alerts XML
    Enrich data and store in SQLite file with a cronjob
    Send alerts with other cronjob to Twist API or Telegram API

I think the "Fetch data from Hacker News API" part is just to get keywords from popular submissions that they use to make Google Alerts for. Then when new stories about those keywords show up, they can write an article first.

6. pawelwentpawel ◴[14 May 23 11:21 UTC] No.35937158[source]▶

>>35930992 (TP) #

> But the interesting question is: why did they write this article?

I'd guess because they're a part of the community and simply want to share their findings. I see no malice here. Having your work (whether writing or a new product) on the front page of HN for a couple hours is a great feeling and gives you a boost of motivation to continue your work.

They did mention the SEO benefits. Nevertheless, they are linking to a post on Indiehackers (not Simple Analytics website) which doesn't help them much in this scenario.

> Do they just think HN readers will forget about this article, and upvote their next bit of content marketing anyway?

As an HN reader, I come here more for comments than the articles themselves. If the article stirs an interesting debate on a topic that I'm interested in, I personally don't care if the authors used some "strategy" to get on the front page or not. Bad and uninteresting spammy content usually doesn't stay on the front page for long.

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