[jacques_chester]

Based on my personal experience, here is a two-step guide for getting a blog post to #1 of HN for 2 days.

1. Write lots of blog posts on various topics. Write multi kilo-word reviews of honest to goodness books with reference to the ideas therein. Really pour yourself into the work -- take as your inspiration Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Submit some of these. Watch them get, at most, a single upvote.

2. Write one (1) angry rant about a company well-known to HNers, with no goals other than to vent a bit. Add "sucks" to the title somewhere. Watch as someone else submits it and your primal screeching zooms to the top of the front page and stays pegged to it for days.

Optional step 3: cultivate cynicism about HN and your reasons for sticking around.

[michaelt]

Content aggregation sites like HN and reddit often weight upvotes based on time. This makes some sense; an article that gets x upvotes in y minutes is more popular than an article that takes 4*y minutes to get the same number of upvotes!

But on Reddit this has an odd side-effect; as early upvotes are the key to getting to the front page, an article that takes 30 minutes to read doesn't get any upvotes in the first 30 minutes. But a meme or a 10-second gif? Upvoted in seconds, and on its way to the front page.

Of course, Reddit is quite successful; no shame in providing bite-sized posts with quick gratification if that's what the market demands.

[napoleond]

This is a really interesting insight. What do you think would be a good way of levelling the playing field for articles which take 30 minutes to read?

[ElliotH]

This is a real problem here, and has been for a while. I think it applies to comments too, quick easy to read and 'obvious' comments earn rapid upvotes, multiparagraph thoughtful pieces get ignored.

[zerostar07]

Also, take the title of yesterday's #1 article, and write an article about the opposite