HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do threads on HN tend to pick up speed?

6 points by cbovis ↗ HN
Being more of a passive homepage user of Hacker News I'm interested to know what the typical life cycle of a popular thread is. Where do people tend to find the 'hot' stories which end up making it to the homepage and inevitably spiral in popularity from there?

I occasionally dip into the 'new' page however this seems so crowded as to potentially not be attractive to most users. Are there a certain group of users which are monitoring this page and promoting stories from there? Are there other services which highlight upcoming stories or does it potentially occur when lots of people submit the same URL and duplicates are identified?

Any visualizations of this life cycle would be really interesting.

4 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 16.4 ms ] thread
opless
As I understand it, five up votes in the first few minutes gets you on the front page.

Of course that means this is a regular popularity fest, complete with sock puppets, politics and the rest.

gus_massa
The details are not clear, but there are some sockpuppets, meatpuppets, shills, astroturfing, bots detectors. The sites that tries too much to game the system are penalized or autokilled.
soneca
From what I see 3 upvotes in the first 10 minutes is usually enough to get to the front page. And I think you can get away from the ring detector and penalties if you just keep your influence on upvotes at 3.

At the same time, I think this is not unfair to HN. There is a lot of luck in getting these 3 first upvotes, and luck, as I see it, shouldn't be a factor on the ranking of a post. When on the frontpage, even for about 10 minutes or less, then there is enough people seeing your title and reading your post to get luck out of equation. And your post will get traction more on merit than luck.

To both take luck out of the equation and avoid being tricked, I think HN should have a small section on the front page with random "new" posts. One or two every 5 minutes. Then people would have a chance to see what's new and chose to upvote. Until then, if you call 3 friends, ask for upvotes regularly spaced in the first 10 minutes, and do it only once, I think you have a pretty good chance to get your Show HN on the front page and see if it stays there by merit. But don't get greedy. Do it with too many friends, for too many time or too many times and you will get penalized.

gus_massa
When you read all the interesting stories from the front page, you should go to the new page to rescue a few undervoted interesting stories. It's like a public service, because there is a lot of crap there.