[ThrowawayR2]

> "When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: 'Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.'" ... "If so, what are the real levers, and what do people consistently misunderstand?"

There are no "levers". People come to HN to discuss nerdy topics and those that have come to HN to help make those discussions more informed and interesting are welcome. Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately. And we are certainly not here to be a gauge of interest to any investors.

The one semi-exception is Show HN, which is intended to showcase something interesting that users can play with. There are separate specific guidelines for Show HN submissions (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and tips from the site moderators (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638). Do note that among the tips is the following "Drop any language that sounds like marketing or sales. On HN, that is an instant turnoff. Use factual, direct language. Personal stories and technical details are great." If you have questions about the guidelines or tips, the site moderators can be reached through the email on the contact page linked at the bottom of the page.

[esperent]

> There are no "levers".

Everyone wants to believe that their community doesn't have levers. But this is just wishful thinking, ego talking. Of course HN has levers, of course the community here can be manipulated.

The easiest way I can see would be to frame a helpful, curious question to which your service just happens to be the answer. So then you most an Ask HN like "can anyone help me to understand why people do X" followed by a few sentences of your thoughts, then at the end say "I've been working on a service to help with this but we don't seem to be getting much to traction, here's a link".

Another approach would be "nerd sniping". Post your site but don't mention anything about what it's for and instead say "I'm having a problem with SSR rendering with NextJS on my site" or something like that. You'll get massive engagement.

[lukan]

"The easiest way I can see would be to frame a helpful, curious question to which your service just happens to be the answer. So then you most an Ask HN like "can anyone help me to understand why people do X" followed by a few sentences of your thoughts, then at the end say "I've been working on a service to help with this but we don't seem to be getting much to traction, here's a link"."

Nah, that would be obvious marketing to most. More sneaky would be answering the question with the recommendation from a different account in a way to promote your service and have that upvoted, but that requires more effort and skill I assume.

But in general yes, this community definitely can also be manipulated, but I would say it is one of the hardest to fool. The standard mentality here I actually would rather describe as critical instead of curious, but there is just lots of garbage being pushed and also my curiosity is limited.

[ThrowawayR2]

People trying that usually use freshly created accounts or accounts that have zero / low activity except to promote their service. It sticks out like a sore thumb. I could point to a couple of examples right now.

[tptacek]

Ask HN is a distinctly bad way to drive engagement for a business through HN. Not a good lever. I agree that there are levers, though.

[throwaway2037]

I love your nerd sniping idea. Literally, I used that same term in my post before I saw yours!

This makes me think of a fun idea: Once a year on HN (April Fool's Day?), we can have a nerd sniping competition where commercial projects try to nerd snipe HN readers with submarine adverts.

[jacquesm]

This says more about you than about HN I think.

Obviously anything can be manipulated, but HN has been remarkably resilient and if there is one thing the collective here is good at then it is at spotting patterns, even over a longer period of time. And once your business is banned from here there isn't really a way back in.

[bombcar]

> There are no "levers".

There are never "no levers" - the best you can do is make sure that the levers you know about are aligned with the purpose of the site.

And that works pretty well. Don't SEO-post, write a blog about some technical aspect of SEO-posting, and you'll do better.

HN-posting successfully can't really be done "at scale" - by design.

Here's a successful formula, but takes some time.

Participate, read things you know about and are interested in. Post comments. Eventually you'll find yourself repeating, or linking to previous comments. Write a blog post about that. Post it.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "Here's a successful formula, but takes some time."

Have you looked at the very first sentence of the OP's submission? Their investors are not going to wait around for any of that. The OP all but outright says they want a "lever" that they can use repeatedly that pops a marketing submission to the HN front page as a gauge of interest to satisfy investors and secure funding. That isn't reliably possible even for longtime HN users with a solid posting history and high karma (and thank heavens for that or HN would be a very different place).

[bombcar]

Exactly. My response was the polite version of "your investors are using HN as a gating factor, and the gate isn't really gameable."

And if it did become a game, it would become pretty worthless (liked LinkedIn).

[PurpleRamen]

> There are no "levers".

I disagree, there are always levers. But the "comfort-zone" of HN's mods and crowd is much smaller and more specific, while the attention on misbehaviour is much sharper, so the lever are not as easy to pull as on other platforms. HN is basically hard-mode, compared to any big noisy platform.

> Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately.

That's only true if it's done poorly, or outside HNs core-topics. There is a good deal of sneaky marketing on HN, but usually well integrated into the normal flow of comments, so It's either accepted in context, or low enough to fly under the radar. In a nutshell, this means, everything is accepted, as long as it brings value, high entertainment or satisfy curiosity, and is not just selling stupidly in your face.

At the end, HN is still a platform of smarter and more educated people, and they want to be handled on their level. If you can match this, you can pull every lever they've given space for. But of course, that's not something many can easily do.

[throwaway2037]

Is there an easy way to show top 10 "Show HN" posts (by upvotes and/or comments) in the last one year? That might help this person to see what works on HN. I expect the list to have no obvious patterns except that they are wildly nerdy or unexpectedly useful. To be clear, I am not suggesting this list to make it easier for the original poster to manipulate the HN system. The readers here are way too discerning to be easily fooled by something obviously commercial appearing under the "Show HN" banner.

Two people that come to mind that normally generate an enormous number of upvotes and discussion are blog posts from Alyssa Rosenzweig (Asahi Linux GPU drivers) and Justine Tunney (Cosmopolitan Libc). Both of those projects trigger near-superhuman levels of nerd sniping (https://xkcd.com/356/). Few nerds can resist!

Final note: To me, this question feels like the "uncanny valley" of nerd discussion boards. Can you imagine posting something similar to LWN.net trying to figure out how to get your commercial project featured in a story?