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Ask HN: Is it better to promote on a network in periods of high or low activity?

1 points by jimothyhalpert7 ↗ HN
For example, I'm thinking showing something to HN via 'Show HN'. Keeping in mind, that I only get one shot (as discussed in another question), what would be the best time to promote?

The dilemma: periods of high activity also entail high frequency of 'Show HN' posts.

'Best' is defined as that, which will result in the most views. Ultimately, I'd go for user retention, but determining when is the highest saturation of my target audience on a given network is next to impossible, so I'm going with best = biggest number of views.

With this, a simplified approach would be something like: bestTime = fn(currentNumberOfUsers, probOfSeeingPost). probOfSeeingPost in turn would be dependent on the frequency of similar posts, which itself is dependent on the currentNumberOfUsers. So, when one argument (currentNumberOfUsers) is increased, the other (probOfSeeingPost) gets decreased.

Or are there more important factors I'm missing.

1 comment

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benologist
Best thing you can do is submit it and not care if it's popular or not - at best you will get thousands of visitors, many of whom will be disinterested if they came for <content> not <product>, and then it'll be over within a day or two at the most. That leaves ~99.5% of 2016 unaccounted for!