Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

HN is hard to game on purpose. So stop looking for the levers and participate, that's all there is to it. I've made friends here, have been helped by people on projects that I was busy with, did the reverse, found friends and business partners and spend way too much time. HN is a very interesting slice of the online world, a place that is unlike the rest, sometimes a bit dry but always interesting and extremely useful. If you're looking at it to try to understand it then you might as well try to understand a rat or a mouse. You won't understand it because it isn't there to be understood, it just is, like any other organism.

The root of HN is a thing called 'startup news', that was changed very quickly and since then HN has been a focal point for techies of all sorts but also lots of other people from all walks of life and from a large variety of countries. It isn't 'one thing' to everybody that participates, just like a hammer is a different thing for a carpenter than it is for a masoner or a farmer.

The fact that after being a member for a couple of years you have this question indicates a lack of participation, not a lack of understanding.

(I'm a mod here)

It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks.

But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are links to past explanations about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

We try to elevate things that gratify curiosity: creative work, surprising discoveries, deep dives, technical achievements, unusual personal experience, whimsical unpredictability, good conversation, etc. And we try to demote things that run against curiosity, especially repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion.

It gets complicated because you'll also see plenty of repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion on HN—alas! This is the internet after all. But the site survives because the balance of these things stays within tolerable ranges, thanks to two factors: an active community which cares greatly about preserving this place for intended purpose (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html); and an owner (Y Combinator) which pays us to work on the site full time and mainly just wants us to keep it good, to the extent possible.

If you really want to figure this place out, the way to do it is as a reader. Hang out on the site, look at the mix of articles that make the frontpage, spend time in the discussion threads (hopefully the interesting sectors and not the flamey ones!), and over time your eyes will adjust.

What doesn't work—and this is good because we want it not to work—is approaching HN as a platform for promoting content. If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, but anyone) mainly care about "how can I use this thing to get attention for my startup/blog/project/newsletter", then you're operating in 'push' mode rather than 'pull' mode (or, even better, 'idle' mode). In that case you won't be curious because you're too focused on what you're wanting for extraneous reasons—and if you aren't in a state of curiosity, this place won't make sense. At least we hope it won't!

It sometimes blows my mind how questions which essentially boil down to "How do I best manipulate you for personal gain?" can be asked in such an unabashed fashion.

> "When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: 'Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.'" ... "If so, what are the real levers, and what do people consistently misunderstand?"

There are no "levers". People come to HN to discuss nerdy topics and those that have come to HN to help make those discussions more informed and interesting are welcome. Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately. And we are certainly not here to be a gauge of interest to any investors.

The one semi-exception is Show HN, which is intended to showcase something interesting that users can play with. There are separate specific guidelines for Show HN submissions (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and tips from the site moderators (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638). Do note that among the tips is the following "Drop any language that sounds like marketing or sales. On HN, that is an instant turnoff. Use factual, direct language. Personal stories and technical details are great." If you have questions about the guidelines or tips, the site moderators can be reached through the email on the contact page linked at the bottom of the page.

I've found that there can be a lot of randomness for what makes the front page. Not too many people read the "New" page and articles drop off it pretty quickly, so it can be hard for a niche article to attract the handful of votes it needs to appear on the front page. (Though there is a "second chance" feature which helps to ameliorate this issue.) So there's a lot of randomness to what makes it onto the front page.

For instance I submitted an article three times (spaced a year apart). The first two times the article got no upvotes. The third time it got 600+ and hit the top of the front page. It's just a matter of who happens to be looking at the New page at the time.

It works because it discusses important things that are of interest to reasonably smart people. The top 5 items right now.

- Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

Ah, progress on cancer. But in mice, where lots of things work but don't transfer to humans.

- What Is an Elliptic Curve?

A core concept in modern cryptography which I don't understand. The article helped.

- Learn Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Only HN would put something like this near the top of of the forum.

- Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

This week in LLMs. Have to keep up.

- OBS Studio Gets a New Renderer

They're using Apple's Metal for talking to the GPU? How does portability work? OBS runs on Linux and Windows, too, but Metal runs only on Apple machines.

These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things.

If there were “levers” for people to pull to game the site, it would lose all its value and turn into nothing but low-effort self-promotion. I won’t claim to understand everything about HN, but I know that is not in the spirit of the site.

Do you mean 'how do get a Show HN project to earn a lot of votes'?

Be somewhat novel, communicate very clearly (particularly what is' for and why you might want to use it, even if that seems obvious to you) and post around mid-morning PST so people can goof off from work to 'research' your interesting new thing.

This post makes me feel really old.

HN is very self-explanatory if you take it for what it is — a discussion forum. It’s a place where some people post ideas, questions, news, or projects and other people respond to them. That’s it. If you post something interesting or meaningful, then people will respond.

Your question makes me feel ancient because I fear that the concept of communicating to spark conversation (as opposed to communicating to promote or to manipulate or to drive traffic or to pull any number of other “levers”) is exceedingly a thing of the past.

I literally just found out about this website today. I am also having a hard time comprehending what is actually going on here. Like how do you post an ask vs show?

A good portion of it is just pure chance. There are relatively few people patrolling new submissions, and if something doesn't get a couple of upvotes in the first hour or so, it just disappears down the memory hole. So, you'll sometimes lose even if your content is good.

Another part of the equation is topic and tone. There's no sophisticated algorithm, but it's an eclectic forum, so if your post sounds like pure marketing or self-promo, it will probably not make it far. You need to offer something of value to readers, not to you.

An interesting quirk of the system is that people who upvote or comment on stories don't necessarily read them. A lot of HN discussion boils down to people reacting to the prompt in the subject line. There are publications that learned how to game this. I don't think it's a template worth following, but it sells...

Shameless plug: I wrote this as I tried to understand HN: https://hsu.cy/2025/09/how-to-read-hn/ (Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45331030 ) I know it only scratches the surface, but hopefully it can provide some basics.

I've found this list of "undocumented rules" to be useful https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

HN is not a nail. Stop trying to hit it.

Investors talk about HN like it’s a growth lever, but the site mostly behaves like a long-running reading habit with spam defenses. A tiny slice of users on /new decide whether you even get a shot, gravity slowly pushes old stuff down, there’s a “second chance” queue for posts that looked promising but died early, and moderators occasionally hand-tune obvious mistakes. Beyond that, it’s just a bunch of curious people clicking what looks interesting.

The only repeatable “strategy” I’ve seen work is: write things that would be interesting even if HN didn’t exist, and let other people submit them. Trying to treat HN as a distribution channel (carefully timed posts, optimized titles, orchestrated upvotes) reliably backfires because the software + mods are explicitly optimized against that. If you treat it as a weird little newspaper run by nerds for their own curiosity, the dynamics suddenly make a lot more sense.

HN works like this. you can post something and if people have something to say they can comment. if you make the title accurate its more appreciated than making it cool. if people like what you did it will 'take off'. i dont think there's much other than that which i think makes it appealing.

there might be people that try to get more out of it somehow, but i dont think it 'works like that'

To echo what dang said in the thread. It's a place to hang out and learn about new things. Or sometimes old things. It's news, it's history. All with a tech skew. I've had this account since 2008. In that time I've used it in many different ways, including getting stuff onto the front page. Honestly trying to game it doesn't work. Post something people genuinely find interesting and it will make it to the front page and in the case it doesn't sometimes the mod will see that and think it should get another shot.

Sounds like analysis paralysis. Read posts here, pay attention to what this audience expects, and then post your work. If you really want to find a source on this topic Michael Lynch (mtlynch) wrote a book called Hit the Front Page of Hacker News and you can find it if you search for it (I haven't actually read it), but I think spending an hour a week reading HN and asking yourself why a piece of writing did or didn't work for this audience would be more worthwhile.

Please don't try to game the algorithm here.

Have you considered that what you could hear from others, some of those people can be not smart? I know that’s not the reply you seek. But still an input. Sometimes, I think overanalysing something stupid makes quite little sense.

Answering the question directly, I think I understand how news.ycombinator works. It is affiliated with the parent domain, and hence it serves their agenda. As simple as that. It’s not some non-profit entity that owes you something. While I have issues with things like censoring, I understand they owe me nothing. Basically, they _allow_ me to be part of the community, if I behave.

This is what the whole internet was like from 1995 - 2005.

generally politics, and religion, are topics not amenable to prolonged discussion, and slide into hostile disagreement.

use prefixes [Tell HN: Ask HN: Show HN:] and suffixes [ [PDF] [video] [1995] ] where needed.

be a human being, dont repost, or post promotional materials for adspace, cultivate a nuts and guts discussion for any project you promote rather than a sales ad.

Key ingredients of a successful HN story are effort, passion, and curiosity.

Without effort, anyone can do it. Without passion, it's just work. Without curiosity, it's not hacking.

The forum is a harsh mistress

What I find strange is that life feels oddly opaque. I’ve never met anyone who can clearly explain how it works in practice. Not just the rules, but the dynamics: what’s repeatable, what’s luck, and what actually matters.

Theres a whole cottage industry of marketing folks that work on gaming HN. Its a system like any other.

New Job discipline born: "Hacker News Visibility Consultant Services", like there are companys optimizing your position in the app stores :-D

Do you want to know a secret?

Sometimes my friends post on social media platform A "Hey, I've just posted on platform B. Upvotes appreciated."

Or a newsletter will say "please share this post on…"

Or people on Discord / Slack / Matrix will say "people are being mean to me on platform C, where are my defenders at?"

HN feels organic - and is pretty well moderated - but it isn't immune to family & friends giving something an initial boost.

But if no one wants to discuss it, the post will falter.

As for the other levers, it is hard to say. Sometimes the posts I've worked hardest on with the most detail just die a death. But the half-finished thought casually tossed off will Do Numbers. Outrage sometimes works, but it is a fickle friend to tame. Catchy titles aren't clickbait (despite what some people say) but they work best when they are descriptive.

And, finally, people can and do resubmit stuff. What doesn't work at 0900 Monday will be popular at 1700 Tuesday. Why? That's just the way it is.

In the end, it is all luck. But, as the saying goes, the harder you work the luckier you get.

You post the thing.

The HN audience upvotes it or downvotes it or flags it or ignores it.

From the reaction, you get an impression of the reception of the thing.

That's... it.

You're going on my block list, son.

Hackernews SEO agency when?

The round table has no levers

I think I can safely say that nobody understands ~~quantum~~ hacker news

The answer is in the name. The word 'hacker' used to more refer to someone who is a tinkerer, diy engineer, curious about how systems, components, etc work. Hacker News is still somewhat true to this ethos, what's popular here aligns with this old-school curiosity mindset. Of course the exact interests of the userbase has changed over the years, but if you spend a lot of time on this forum you eventually understand some of the common themes that get the minds of the hackers turning.

Unfortunately due to the enshittification of things people are conditioned to see HN as something to be gamed and leveraged for personal gain now, but in general it's algorithm-less enough, the the mods are strict enough, (thank god) that the type of content here stays pointed towards the original 'hacker' ideals.

I think it is quite simple. Hacker News. News for hackers. Not in the "hacking" Hollywood sense of computer crimes (although there's some of that, too), but in the sense of intellectual curiosity.

Probably more than 70% of your post's impact will come from a catchy headline. People will be curious about your headline, and click through. And then, upvote if they find it interesting.

If the post is interesting but the headline isn't, then, well, bad luck.

Once a post gathers enough momentum, it goes to the front page. Then, there are a thousand bots on Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc, that repost articles that got to the front page, and it gathers even more momentum from a large portion of technologists that don't have an HN account but follow these bots.

Things HN likes (in my experience):

- Reverse Engineering (legacy code analysis, hardware teardowns)

- Bug Post-Mortems

- Systems Internals (database engines, kernel scheduling, compiler edge cases)

- Retro-Computing

- Infrastructure History

- Obscure Museums / Web Archives

- Convivial Tools (right to repair, privacy first)

- Intellectual Curiosities: (biological quirks, niche economies)

- Neologisms (enshittification, context engineering)

Years ago I wrote [0] about the lessons I learned by reaching the front page of both HN and Product Hunt and honestly, all these years later, the only thing I can confidently say is that I don't know shit. Sometimes people posts here things I wrote and for one reason or another they gain traction.

I personally have no clue why and I kinda like it. Like probably many others I come here to find interesting content and have interesting conversation because there are a lot of genuinely interesting people on this site.

But if you're trying to minmaxing your presence on HN, well good luck.

[0] : https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/what-i-learned-by-being-1...

I've had mixed feelings about HN in terms of how people perceive a product over the last few years. I used to have an overwhelmingly positive opinions about the community up until COVID: everyone started making the "solution that will help researchers find a cure", which, in all instances, ended up being tons of people independently loading up papers into elasticsearch. And when I pointed out that they are all solving a problem no one has, I got jumped by a ton of people going "nooooo you just don't understand how powerful what these systems are". At the end, none of those turned out to be the silver bullet, or a bullet for that matter.

Recently it's the AI craze: you have a complex problem to solve: "AI can easily do that". You have infrastructure issues: "AI can easily do that". You have issues processing petabytes of data fast and efficiently: "AI can easily solve that". I am getting a ton of bots trying to access my home network: "AI can easily solve that". I am having a hard time falling asleep: "AI". I have a flu: "AI".

In a nutshell, the shiny new toy syndrome is very common so the reception of a product is not a guarantee for success. To give you an example: recently some people(pretty active on here) got in touch with me with regards to an initiative I am a part of: they claimed that they wanted some expertise on the subject I agreed to schedule a call. It turned out to be a sales pitch for yet another product which tries to solve a problem but it does not because the people who built it fundamentally do not understand the problem. Forget the fact that I am not interested in being their client, given that it's a volunteer project and none of the people involved are paid to do it(if anything, we are paying from our own pockets to keep it alive), it was yet another techbro product which tries to build a skyscraper starting from the roof. Except the ground underneath is partially lava, partially a swamp.

I think it is all related to the impostor syndrome: young people have it, they get a bit older and gain confidence. By the time people hit their early to mid 30s, they start realizing that most of the world operates on patches over patches and 2 layers down, no one has a clue what is going on.

Are you talking about this website or Ycombinator?

It’s just a a forum

What I know: the karma system is broken, because it is very hard to provide a controversial opinion/fact without being mass de-karma-ed.

For instance, there is serious hate here about web interop with classic noscript/basic (x)html browsers (namely basic HTML forms with at best <video> <audio> elements, optional simple CSS, often a document which is a "semantic" 2D html table with proper ids for navigation, encrypted URL parameters are your friends).

And AIs...

I made a Show HN once, for my project. It provided a lot of eyes, users, and useful comments. But as it often happens, the first time I posted it it got lost into the cacophony and no one cared. I reached out to the mods, asked if I could qualify for the second chance pool [1] and my project had, finally, a chance in the spotlight.

Hacker News is too large. There's too many people and honestly not many hackers. The voting system is silly. What rises to the top is the common denominator, not what is truly interesting to any niche.

Another thing to know: a post with too many comments vs upvotes will be sent to the shadow realm. This is claimed to help deal with hot-button topics, but I've seen many interesting post that suffer the same fate because people have a lot of interesting things to share. I've seen it happen on a post about Forth of all things, with the greybeards coming to chime about something few care about, and it got hidden pretty quickly. Given the numbers, this will be the fate of your post as well.

Only dang knows how this place works. You can get an inkling of its working by being here a while and piecing it together from his comments.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

Ok. So you'd like to promote: https://www.legitcontrol.com/ (at least you'll get your link in one comment here, no need to thank me ;-))

A system that somehow allows you to tame AI agents' unruly use of git (is that it?)

I see you did use Show HN, and that didn't work.

What you could have done is email [email protected] telling them that your Show HN is not being upvoted. This happens, and usually dang and others mod will take a look and if you're within the guidelines will give it a small boost so it shows up in the main Show HN page. Then you're on your own.

Make sure your catchphrase, or hook is well written, cause most people here will not read past "Make Agents a Safe Collaborator in your App".

Anyways, as others said here. There are no ways to "game" HN. the closest you will manage is what you just did, basically asking for help...

That's the key, ask for help, and people will respond. People are nice, and they are willing to procrastinate their intellect away for free.

The forum tries to not be gameable. If it’s in its ideal state then it works when you have something that is legitimately interesting to the community, although it’s up to the interpreter to decide how well that works.

The only really opaque thing I’ve found is the anti spam/anti flame war rules but it’s not crazy to keep those secret and I say that as someone who gets temp banned by those rules on here frequently

edit: oh, you should also go to your profile and set showdead to `yes` if you want to see the unfiltered forum. You'll get about 10% controversial opinions and 90% green name accounts posting spam.

Ah and if the poster's name is green in your browser it means they are a very new account

When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”

Unless you're building a start up where the potential customers are specifically HN and Reddit readers, get the hell away from those investors. They're idiots.

As lovely and wonderful as the readers of HN and Reddit are, being loved on HN or Reddit means essentially nothing. People here are the magpies of the internet - we love seeing the new shiny thing but that does not tell you it will be a success with the people who might want to buy it. For every Dropbox posted here there are hundreds of Show HN posts that didn't really go anywhere despite having tons of very positive commentary.

If you want to show investors that your start up's product has potential post about it where your customers go and get feedback from people who might give you their money. If you really want to prove your start up has potential, sell to those people and actually get their money. If you can get a sale based on your prototype/proof-of-concept/MVP product that is worth more than a million "Yeah, looks ace, I'd buy that if it was <price that's far too low>." posts from us.

Is this some kind of a "Reflexive Control" Psyop ?

How much is it worth for you to know ? ;-)

It is not clear what exactly you are looking for?

> “Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.”

From my experience, both HN and Reddit have the worst traffic. I got "tens of thousands" of visitors from both with exactly zero conversion. I am now getting a few hundreds a month from Google and other sources and the conversion rate is roughly 20-25%. So pretty much not worth it to pursue HN/Reddit for your startup though your mileage would probably vary.

I'd use HackerNews for what it is, a news site for casual/mixed information with sometimes interesting discussions. You could have much better levers in other places.

One of the real levers is that if you get randomly and inexplicably locked out of your Google account and your whole life/business is destroyed, posting on Hacker News might be your only chance at redemption.