[dheera]

No, but the only way to get a post to the front page of HN these days is to discreetly ask a bunch of your friends to upvote it. And people with high karma are probably people who tend to have other friends who are also HN readers and who they can ask for upvotes.

As much as this probably isn't the fair system we all want, it's what the system's optimization encourages today.

Try posting something SUPER interesting, staying quiet and not telling anyone. It's almost guaranteed not to make it to the front page.

Although I don't encourage this, with the current algorithm, you could probably even prevent others' from getting their work on the front page by posting it ahead of time. When they try to post it they'll get a duplicate link but it's already stale and past its upvote-to-front-page life, which is probably about 30-60 minutes.

[dang]

Why do you say these things? I'd be fascinated to know.

Almost everything here is wrong. HN's anti-abuse software isn't perfect, but if you ask friends to upvote your article, there's a high chance it won't help and you'll get your (and their) accounts penalized in the process. We actually go through the penalized posts looking for things to rescue because people tank their own good work in this way so reliably.

The dupe detector does not work the way you described.

If you post something super interesting that doesn't get attention, you (or anyone) can always email us at [e-mail] and we might put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), in which case it will get a random placement on HN's front page.

[dheera]

Thanks! This is helpful to know.

I've seen lots of friends (including dozens of YC founders) ask for upvotes, usually via FB in ways that wouldn't necessarily constitute a ring (e.g. asking strangers in founder-friendly facebook groups), and they're usually of things worthy of publicity, and they do make it to the front page pretty quickly after the upvote requests.

I've also seen a lot of instances where posting once didn't do anything, and then posting a second time with an equivalent but different URL + asking a few friends to help upvote made it to the front page pretty quickly.

For example, I posted https://github.com/dheera/rosshow on 2019-Mar-27 -- no dice.

Then posted it again with a "www.", i.e. https://www.github.com/dheera/rosshow -- then asked a couple friends to upvote -- and then BAM front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19519165).

So the only thing I did differently between trial A and B was asked people to upvote, and trial B succeeded.

[dang]

Assuming I'm reading the data correctly, your friends' votes were rejected by HN's software on that second submission. Randomness is the biggest factor on /newest, which is why we allow a small number of reposts to begin with: to give good submissions multiple cracks at the bat.

[dheera]

Thanks, helpful to know! I would have thought reposts would be penalized. Is there anyway to potentially mitigate the randomness factor though? For example by measuring things like impression time, bounce rate, and so on.

[ChuckMcM]

HN has a pretty good voting ring detector. And while folks have emailed me and asked me to upvote their submissions, my response is always "I upvote things I think are interesting and bring something new to the discussion, period." I would gather other "high karma" individuals have similar positions.

[modeless]

> the only way to get a post to the front page of HN these days is to discreetly ask a bunch of your friends to upvote it

This is not true. I don't do this and 5/13 of my submissions hit the front page in the last 12 months.

The most important thing is to find an article that already has a suitable title so that you don't have to editorialize it against the site guidelines just to get the crucial first upvotes. It's a shame that often the best article on a topic doesn't have the best title (often when it is a primary source). Sometimes the mods change the link later.

[dang]

This is a difficult subtlety to get across publicly, but it can be ok to edit the title to grab attention when an article is particularly good for HN. That sin is venial.

If the article isn't particularly good, and especially if someone is just trying to promote something, woe betide.

[anigbrowl]

Not true. It has much more to do with timing - both time of day and submitting a post when the audience is receptive to it, not necessarily being the first to do so. I have been here a long and have relatively high karma; about 3/4 of my posts get no traction, some get a small amount of attention, some go to the front page and stay there all day. The posts that are most successful in terms of getting attention are often not the ones I think most deserving of it, eg scientific journal articles with the meatiest content usually fare poorly.

I've never asked anyone to boost a post and being a rather nati-social creature I don't have an audience of devoted fans, if anything the opposite. I could get more karma if I was selective about the time of day I posted (eg lunchtimes are usually good) but I just post stuff as I discover it.

[neogodless]

I don't know where my karma ranks, but I've had a few front page submissions - nothing original. Just interesting reviews of brand new tech, that sort of thing. I simply posted the article first and lots of people were interested in it.

To me, it seems obvious that the value of the content and timing are the two biggest levers. I've gone to post things that are new and interesting, but someone else posted it, my submission counted as an upvote, and the submission ended up on the front page.

I have never asked anyone to upvote anything.

[nick-garfield]

I'm sure you're right that people occasionally leverage a friend network to upvote content to the front-page. I get the sense this happens a lot on Product Hunt.

But I know for a fact this isn't the _only_ way to reach the front-page of HN because I didn't ask anyone to upvote this post. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[paulgb]

For what it's worth, Ask and Show posts are less likely to fall into the abyss than regular posts because they both have their own front pages where the threshold is lower than the main FP. So they have a longer exposure time to gain the upvotes to make it to the FP.

[edoceo]

Isn't "super interesting" relative/subjective? And if it doesn't make FP its therefore not super interesting? Heck, I'm low karma, posted mildly interesting things that have been FP. Maybe FP is the measurement of interesting?

[dheera]

Relative to the general audience.

Ideally, whether or not something makes it to the front page should depend on whether the readers of HN think it's interesting.

However, the current (sub-optimal IMO) situation is that as long as it meets some pretty low bar for "interesting", it depends MUCH more on the submitter's friend network than the readers.