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Ask HN: why do my Ask HN posts get bounced?

5 points by chris_dcosta ↗ HN
Recently I have asked a couple of questions on HN and my posts have been almost immediately bounced to the nth page - virtually out of existence.

What's going on? I don't think they have been unreasonable questions - mainly asking for answers to addressing financial calcs for startups - surely very relevant questions for this forum.

8 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 31.5 ms ] thread
anonymous-dev
How does the post "rank" work on HN ?
bdfh42
The FAQ (at the bottom of the page) reveals that.
mooism2
Presumably the people who see your questions on the /new page don't find them interesting enough to upvote to the front page.
chris_dcosta
I thought the point of pre-fixing with "Ask HN:" or "Show HN:" or "Tell HN:" or any other such tags was to make sure that it appeared in the "Ask" section, and ranked separately?
bdfh42
A quick review shows that you do indeed ask a lot of questions. Some have attracted a good number of karma points so this would imply that the more interesting ones are getting the attention they deserve.

Of course, time of day can have an impact - if a lot of submissions turn up on the new page at the same time then yours can sink below the fold before it gets much attention.

chris_dcosta
As a proportion of my few submissions (21 at this point), yes. I don't read much else on HN apart from the questions, as I find the news feed can't compete for my money with Twitter, so I guess it's natural that if I do put something forward its pertinent to this section.

Shouldn't be a reason for down votes though, especially if it's of general interest to the startup community.

Perhaps this is not the point of the Ask HN section, and therefore I've missed it.

brudgers
Your posts were probably bounced down because HN bounces nearly every post down.

I believe an "Ask HN" makes the top of the front page with just a few upvotes. But most questions are uninteresting. Including this one.

sw007
If it's uninteresting, why come to this post and comment?