It's very important to note that getting to the top of Hacker News is an exception, not a rule for good projects (and definitely should not be a primary marketing strategy, as it's just a bonus).
I haven't seen an impact-of-getting-to-the-top-of-HN post in a very long time. Anecdotally, the traffic for a post getting to the top of HN is not what it used to be.
I don't know about traffic, but we tend to downweight meta posts, including ones about getting to the top of HN, because as a genre they're too samey and HN thrives on diffs. This post is an exception though, partly because the project resonated with the community in an unusual way, and partly because of the heart with which the story is written.
You're right that it isn't a marketing strategy. It's too much of a lottery. Worse, when projects or startups try to get attention that way, they make themselves less interesting.
> You're completely right that it isn't a marketing strategy, though.
Have you thought about creating a formal program to preflight more in-depth content? It's hard to justify spending 100 hours writing a blog post when the chances of having more than zero people see it depend on whether or not Elon Musk smoked weed that day or whatever. I realize it's partly just impossible to predict what people will be interested in, but that could be a way to encourage people to create more interesting stuff.
Yes, I've thought about that a lot. I agree with you that the economics are off—not in terms of money, but time and energy and attention. If that could change, then the pool of interesting projects and articles might grow, which would be great for us all.
I think it's fine just to have people submit proposals, getting the proposal approved, and then creating the content and having the final post approved, rejected, or getting suggested edits. This could either be done by the mods or by some sort of rotating panel. Then the final content could be treated like the jobs postings, where there is a separate tab for preflighted content and it lives on the front page for at least some minimum amount of time, longer if there is engagement.
It could also be interesting to try something like Edge.org, where different people create content around a given question or theme.
Isn’t this where persistence pays off? Don’t spend 100 hours writing a blog post: spend 100 hours writing 100 blog posts. Then keep going. People will notice, word will spread, and you’ll find yourself here (or wherever) organically.
That's exactly the problem though; the incentives push people to write a hundred 1-hour blog posts rather than one 100-hour blog post. But everyone would be better off if people just wrote one or two really good posts a year.
The raw numbers are less important than the quality of those numbers. The HN audience is unlike any other when it comes to visitors who are more likely to accomplish your "business goal".
By that I mean, this community will signup, tinker, praise, buy and complain, at a much greater rate than any other form of web traffic.
I haven't seen an impact-of-getting-to-the-top-of-HN post in a very long time. Anecdotally, the traffic for a post getting to the top of HN is not what it used to be.