The Value of Hitting the HN Front Page

Summary

I’ve been a member of Hacker News (HN) since 2012. You can see my profile here. (Thanks to Jeff Beard for introducing me to it so many years ago.) I currently hover around the upper 30s on the top 100 leader list. I’ve talked about that community with the good folks at RedMonk. After submitting thousands of stories, including over 400 with more than 100 points, here are outcomes I expect from a high ranking HN post. Traffic The first is the traffic. It’s not uncommon to get thousands of visits from an HN post that hangs out on the front page. Make sure you have a CDN at the ready. It is, however, unlikely to convert. Whether you want people to buy, download, or even sign up for a newsletter, HN traffic isn’t much help. It’s low conversion, brand awareness traffic. That may be what you need–just standing out among the crowd is tough these days. But don’t think you’ll trend on HN and get a ton of sign ups. The second valuable result is the comments. DO NOT SLEEP on these. You have the attention of a large number of smart people who don’t know you, but are taking the time to share their thoughts. They are giving you precious feedback. Do not ignore it, explain it away, or get hurt by it. Instead, try to understand why they are commenting the way they are. Engage and ask questions that show you have thought about their comment. The best time to do this is right after they make a comment, but even a day later you’ll get some replies. You don’t have to slavishly make changes based on comments–I’m not even sure that is possible, given that they will conflict. But you should consider them the same way that you would if someone sent you an email. Follow-on Traffic After having a post trend on HN, I’ve seen follow-on smaller bumps in traffic in the weeks after. This comes from someone discovering your post on HN and sharing it. This could be from a newsletter, a FaceBook group, a follow-on blog post, or via another social network. I don’t know if this traffic converts better...