What makes a HN post popular?
I'm making a product geared towards developers. It's an interactive version of "Build your own X" tutorials, where you learn how a software tool works by building it on your own from scratch.
Every time I release a challenge, I post it on Reddit, Hacker news and our Discord server. The reddit posts seem to consistently attract a fair amount of attention, but the HN posts always turn out to be duds.
I was fairly confident that this is a topic that the Hacker News crowd is interested in, because I've seen posts of this kind regularly hitting the front page. Based on the last three posts though, I'm starting to doubt if I'm reading signals wrong.
Here are a few posts that got very popular, and are in the same domain/area: (can't post links because of I don't have enough rep)
- Build your own React - 1478 upvotes
- Build your own Text Editor - 711 upvotes
(I'm picking the very popular ones, but a search for "Build your own" on HN will reveal many more of this kind that do get popular)
My posts, in comparison:
- Learn docker internals by building a toy clone - 5 upvotes
- Learn git internals by building a toy clone from scratch - 2 upvotes
The same content on Reddit, for contrast:
- Build your own Docker - 134 upvotes
- Build your own Git - 46 upvotes
Maybe I should try using text posts instead of links? Tweak the title? Choose a better time to post?
Anyone here had similar experiences? Any suggestions?
I don't know how to make a popular hacker news post, but the one thing I noticed: your titles are long and confusing compared to the successful ones, and also compared to the posts you made on Reddit.
"Learn ... Internals by making your own toy clone from scratch"
Versus
"Build your own ..."
In fact the first time I read the title you use on hacker news, I thought it was about making a clone of some sort of toy. With the amount of posts on hacker news, a lot of people probably don't bother reading carefully.
Really hard to say, specifically! I've generally had very little traction on what I share here and quite a bit on HN and Reddit.
Part of it is definitely topic, but a lot is also other norms (i.e. how much personal promotion or even spam is tolerated, the style of writing, the tone, the length, etc). One obvious thing that leaps out at me is title length.
Update: since I wrote the above comment 7 hours ago, I submitted something to HN and got to #6. Maybe you can figure out how/why. I'm still not sure!
link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22463769
Tailwind UI is from two very popular people, I doubt that's going to help me analyze what makes a good post 😅
It sounds like you've just gotten at least one idea on how to make a good post—make it about someone (or something) popular! ⚡
In addition to the other comments, also realize there is a lot of luck involved. A repost is always worth a shot and is allowed once or twice if you didn't succeed.
I'd try reposting with the clearer titles, and make sure the HN title matches your page title for less confusion.
I was confused reading:
"This is the second CodeCrafters challenge. We’re currently running early access trials."
I think this will throw people off. They'll wonder "can I do this? do I need to pay for something or sign up?". They'll bounce and forget about it.
For people to think this is something I'd share, this is something I'd upvote I think a normal blog post is better: This means that you can't ask people to sign up to read it.
Nice catch. Makes sense to remove this entirely - it's irrelevant to the page's content. Removed!
Does not seem to be a fair comparison:
Learn docker internals by building a toy clone
Learn git internals by building a toy clone from scratch
are tutorials on how to use software. There are numerous such resources.
On the other hand
Build your own Docker
Build your own Git
are CREATION of major software! This is much more difficult and complex than the tutorials.