Earlier today I submitted a Show HN which failed badly until it got flagged (See. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24960293)<p>This is three things I learned from this experience:<p>- Stay the fu<i></i> around for Show HN: I went for dinner with my parents about 30 minutes after the submission and during the dinner time I was not able to answer questions<p>- Have an archive of your newsletter in order to allow people to know what they are getting themselves into (https://simon-frey.com/weeklycspaper/archive/)<p>- Do not use the default email templates. A lot of the confusions came up as I took the default sign up templates which looked too generic.<p>I hope to make up a little bit for my mistakes earlier today with this post.<p>Maybe after fixing this mistakes some of you might be interested in the newsletter after all:
I will send you a research paper mainly about distributed systems and backend development (as this are my day-to-day topics): https://simon-frey.com/weeklycspaper/<p>p.S. Does anyone of you how the mechanism of getting flagged works?
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html</a> lists sign-up pages and newsletters as off-topic. Even with zero comments there was the chance it was deemed not a fit for the Show HN category.<p>It's curious that on the one hand founders are told to start with something super basic to check user interest, and a landing page promising something (which may or may not exist) is such an option. On the other hand Show HN requires something ready and filter submission that only promise but hide the product.<p>Link to the archives helps, removing Show HN, too.
For clickable versions of the links:<p>Failed Show HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24960293" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24960293</a><p>Newsletter Archive: <a href="https://simon-frey.com/weeklycspaper/archive/" rel="nofollow">https://simon-frey.com/weeklycspaper/archive/</a><p>Weekly CS Paper Newsletter: <a href="https://simon-frey.com/weeklycspaper/" rel="nofollow">https://simon-frey.com/weeklycspaper/</a>
“Flagged” is exclusively “users click flag, algorithm tipping point reached”. The site admins can offer guidance on how something could result in heavy flagging, and can override it if it seems like users weren’t acting in good faith.<p>“Dead” is exclusively admins, and can only be overridden by a high karma site user vouching for it (which undeads it).