I think that luck is just a much bigger factor than people think.
A while back, I wrote a blog post and posted it to HN. Looked up the best time to post, labored over the wording in the title, everything. It got like three views and disappeared quickly into nirvana.
I was super discouraged and didn't feel like writing more about this topic (probably dumb after just one post but hey that's how I felt).
Then, a few days later, some random person re-posted my blog post to HN. This time it exploded and landed on the front page, giving me a couple hundred subscribers alone. Until now I have no idea why the difference was so huge.
This experience taught me that luck is just insanely important. Not sure how this conclusion helps though.
On HN it all comes down to having 5 people upvoting your post in the first 30 minutes, so of course there is a lot of luck in here.
The rule I follow when I want to publish one post is this one:
- Publish it one time first and see if you get at least 2 upvotes
- If you got them, try again to post it the next day at 9am (sf time)
- If still not successful try again in 3 days
If you dont get those 5 guys interested in your post in 30 minutes you will never get the frontpage, when you are on the frontpage, then there will be enough people seeing it and deciding if it should stay on the frontpage
On HN there are also a lot of emphasis on the title, and clickbait helps a lot also (look at this current post)
(I manage this [1] newsletter of 'HN blogposts which went unnoticed' and very often a post is linked in the newsletter and then a few days after that reaches the frontpage, because it gets re-posted or included in the second pool chance)
I do like to point out that there are bad examples. Titles that misrepresent content or low quality listicle stuff + "You won't believe #2!"
But headlines have been trying to entice people to read stories since before there were clicks to bait. I know a lot of people here think headlines should be basically boring but that's not how publications outside of journals etc. have ever operated.
I disagree, I posted my Show HN thread [0] on a Sunday, got only 1 upvote in 36 hours, but then it started getting traction. I am not sure what happened, but you can still get on the front page even if you don't get upvotes immediately after submission.
>I was super discouraged and didn't feel like writing more about this topic...This time it exploded and landed on the front page
I read something along the lines "Doing is often better than thinking of doing" somewhere and made it kinda my personal motto. Little things add up and you never know when the momentum builds and things start to feel better. I failed to get donations for my tutorials for about a year. Then I tried out converting them to a book. First one didn't give me much financial benefit but the second one did well enough. After 2 years and 7 books, I have sustainable income for the first time since leaving my job 6 years ago.
I have more ideas than I can ever implement, but I try to note them down and work on what I can. 2 hits out of 10 is still better than 0 hits out of 0 attempts. Those hits need luck too, as you mention. Seeing my idea come alive is immensely satisfying too.
Surely the right lesson to take would be to try something like posting links several times? To paraphrase, even if success always comes from accident, there are always ways to make yourself more accident-prone.
I post things several times to HN. Other communities (lobste.rs, reddit) frown on this more, but HN seems just fine with it (as long as you aren't obnoxious).
I've definitely seen articles I posted (not necessarily mine) get reposted and have wildly different visibility.
It's also a fun excuse to go trolling through your back catalog of writing and see what is worth posting today.
> This experience taught me that luck is just insanely important. Not sure how this conclusion helps though.
Other than being a consolation when you work hard. Which isn't to be discounted.
Thanks for sharing your story.
I will say that I've had a couple of posts on the front page of HN or r/programming and still only get single digit subscribers. So maybe that does point to an issue with the content.
Which then brings up the bigger question of "what is my goal"? If I'm happy writing what I do and don't need a bigger audience, should I just keep doing what I'm doing (and accept the current results)?
It's not just HN. I write for a number of online pubs/sites. Sometimes I'll write something that I think is particularly clever/insightful/useful and it gets relatively few pageviews and no engagement. Then I'll knock something out in a couple hours that I think is fine but pretty-cookie cutter and it gets 10x or more the engagement.
Paraphrasing an Elton John quote: "People think it's easy for me to know what will be a hit because I've had so many. The truth is I've written songs I was sure would be a hit and nobody ended up listening to. I've also written songs that I didn't think would do anything and I even hesitated to include on the album and they turned out to be my biggest hits."
I have noticed with HN, there are waves of content on subjects, a topic on something interesting is posted and then over the next few days related posts will popup and the audience who is already interest from the initial post that blew up is primed to read more.
I'm not sure you can engineer one of these waves, but you can jump on one when it appears perhaps.
I've definitely jumped on waves via comments, rather than posts. Sometimes having the first comment on a highly ranked post leads to significant traffic, as well as insight.
But that's helpful to think about waves of posts too.
A while back, I wrote a blog post and posted it to HN. Looked up the best time to post, labored over the wording in the title, everything. It got like three views and disappeared quickly into nirvana.
I was super discouraged and didn't feel like writing more about this topic (probably dumb after just one post but hey that's how I felt).
Then, a few days later, some random person re-posted my blog post to HN. This time it exploded and landed on the front page, giving me a couple hundred subscribers alone. Until now I have no idea why the difference was so huge.
This experience taught me that luck is just insanely important. Not sure how this conclusion helps though.