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How we hack Hacker News and consistently hit the front page

(www.indiehackers.com)
414 points muchtest | 1 comments | 13 May 23 16:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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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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jsnell ◴[13 May 23 18:08 UTC] No.35930992[source]▶
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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1. pawelwentpawel ◴[14 May 23 11:21 UTC] No.35937158[source]▶
> 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.