I used a dataset from HuggingАace to analyse all Show HN posts for the past 3 years. Here is what influences if the post gets on the front page.
- Niche technical topics have the highest viral rates (Rust, Postgress, Lua, etc)
- Open source tools are the top performing category with 13.9% viral rate
- "I built" outperforms "We built"
- Sunday noon UTC has the highest chances to hit the front page
- Titles with a parenthetical work much better that those without.
This is great insight, thank you. I have recently learnt that being shadow banned doesn't help either, so not sure if you'll see this comment. Either way, great work.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 22.7 ms ] thread- Niche technical topics have the highest viral rates (Rust, Postgress, Lua, etc) - Open source tools are the top performing category with 13.9% viral rate - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Sunday noon UTC has the highest chances to hit the front page - Titles with a parenthetical work much better that those without.
More insights in the blog article.