#1 Lesson from all of this: Instead of talking about your product to your prospect, talk about something your prospect cares deeply about to your prospect.<p>I had no idea what you did and didn't really care until you used it in context of something I did care about: Hacker News. Now I know what you do, understand how it applies to me, and best of all, I'm starting to visualize how else I could use it.<p>We should all approach our prospects like you just did here. Nice job!
Actually the reason his posts stopped making it to the frontpage is that the last 3 before this all set off the voting ring detector.<p>I don't know how accurate his other conclusions are, but it seems unlikely that new signups are down, considering the trend in traffic: <a href="http://www.archub.org/hntraffic-17oct12.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.archub.org/hntraffic-17oct12.png</a>
Another possibility: people have tired of your formula. Andrey Karpov used to submit blog posts with the results of running his fancy commercial static analyzer on various open source code to Reddit. The first several got a lot of upvotes; a while later it became clear that it was mostly hocking a product. The more your blog comes to resemble an infomercial the less you can expect to be on the front page.
"If anyone out there suspected that the 'old guard' had given up on HN, this chart proves them wrong."<p>Of the people here since the first year, probably only 25% still participate regularly. Occasionally I'll stumble across some discussion from the early years in Google, and it's crazy how different the site was back then. There are still good comments now, but back then there were entire conversations that were good. I don't even bother to write the kind of comments that I used to, because they wouldn't work at all on the site as it is today.
If you look at my submission history of my blog then I think it's clear that HN likes things that are original and/or well thought out. My weaker blog posts go nowhere, but ones that are detailed make it. So, if there's a formula for appearing on HN, it's write something original and/or deep.
Very useful analysis. After running Hacker Newsletter for the past 2+ years I have seen basically this. However, the analysis seems to miss looking at things on a smaller scale like the day and time you post it which has proven to be a big factor [1]. I know even on a weekly basis (which is what I do for the newsletter), it seems some weeks have an abundance of high quality articles compared to others.<p>[1]: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3251877" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3251877</a>
I do think that the day/time an article was posted and also who posted are fairly large contributors to being on the front page. I've written a few articles that have made the front page this year.<p>In at least two instances, I posted the article myself with no upvotes. Then another HN user reposted my articles a few days later (my blog is republished by a couple tech sites), and the same exact content makes the front page. Same article content, same title, just posted by someone else and linking to the mirrored site.<p>Good post Robert. If you're looking for help growing the RJM team, look me up.
I once worked out there were 100:1 visitors to voters for a link.<p>Most of the people I know who peruse HN regularly are <i>not</i> registered users. They are happy to let others do the commenting (which they read).<p><a href="http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18839832580/reddit-vs-hacker-news-vs-twitter" rel="nofollow">http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18839832580/reddi...</a><p>It was super-surprising to see my own blog getting an average of 55pts on HN; I hadn't wondered about that before.
"Interestingly, if you look at the number of upvotes cast each day, the trend is similar. For the past two years, the same number of stories have been competing for about the same number of votes each day." This statement, backed up by the analysis in the submitted blog post, is interesting. I visit the new page<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/newest" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/newest</a><p>as many times per day as I visit the front page, looking for good new submissions to upvote. The limit on the number of users who cast upvotes on new stories appears now to set a limit on the number of new stories that have been submitted in the last two years. As the blog author points out, if HN largely stays on topic, there are only so many new stories each day that fit HN's topic.
Fascinating. However, one must be careful about jumping to conclusions from analysis like this. I see a few items where the author that might have come to the wrong conclusion.<p>- New user growth. I don't think its b/c a 'saturation point' has been hit for the HN community as the article hypothesizes. There was a period in the last few years where there was an conscious choice by HN to restrict user growth in order to maintain a higher signal to noise ratio. Newbies are now marked with green and there is no register link on the homepage. for a while there wasn't a way for new users to sign up.<p>- The NYT more favored compared to the WSJ? most likely not due to the quality of the writing but b/c WSJ articles are not available to non-subscribers by default.
Granted, it is natural to want people to hear what you have to say, but I did not think the reason for posting on HN was so you could try to make it to the front page. The blog post could have been titled "How I'm trying to get my submissions to the front page of HN".
My takeaway --- from the fact that Matt Might's domain is second only to pg's --- is that you should write up easy to understand lecture notes on deep PL-related topics.
My interpretation of how this one shot right to the top: Hacker News loves posts about itself. :)<p>Nice analysis - the user engagement stats were very different from what I was expecting (I think I would have agreed with Jake before I saw the data).
The retention rate actually seems relatively low as an absolute percentage, though the way it plateaus is interesting. I did an analysis of the retention of the oldest Slashdot users (<a href="http://www.kmjn.org/notes/early_slashdot_users.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kmjn.org/notes/early_slashdot_users.html</a>), and it was much higher: about 70% after 2 years, rather than 30%. Took about <i>10 years</i> to drop to 30%. Granted, that's for the earliest users, so retention rates are probably (much?) lower among later signups.
you say the two possible reasons you are not making the front page are: your content is weak, or people's taste's have changed. The fact that the number of submissions has not changed suggest to me a third and more plausible option: The quality of submissions, and therefore the competition for the "front page" has increased.
> Also interesting is the enormous gap between the New York Times, whose content tops this list, and the Wall Street Journal, whose content performs among the worst.<p>I think this might actually be more related to the WSJ paywall. If you dont have a subscription, you can't view many WSJ articles, whereas the reverse is true for the NYT.<p>On an unrelated note - I wonder how the category of HN related posts do, relative to other (basically same analysis of the "Pinterest" category). Judging by the success of this post, I suspect HN + Data are a good mix. Are posts about "Data" just as successful?
<i>"I chose to categorize content by the mention of things like big companies (i.e., Amazon, Google), Hot Startups (i.e. Pinterest, Instagram), Sensationalism (i.e. Best, Worst, First), Programming Languages (everything I could think of), and Profanity (which was fun)."</i><p>What happens to stories that use sensationalism and profanity? Or sensationalism and a new startup?
This is an interesting analysis yet the information can be derived from using your site's analytics and your observational skills to come to the author's conclusion.<p>It's like a painting - the subject matter is important, yet the stuff around the main subject is what makes it stand out.<p>Analyze what your stats <i>don't</i> have, or seem to have 'less of', as compared to other content.<p>I think the data analysis could have been more interesting to a broader audience by making it more 'newsworthy' rather than a raw analysis targeted at a relatively small community (compared to a more general audience).<p>By 'newsworthy' I mean something along the lines of 'NYTimes, WSJ used by technical users too' - or something like that - or something like - 'Hackers in controversy - observers and participants'.
I think the basis for evaluating the quality of a community lies in the discourse and communication. Submissions are a part of that, but the discussion that follows (i.e. comments) is the most important indicator of change. Personally, there seems to be an influx of reddit-style comments (little substance, meme-oriented) this year, but that could be a general evolution of the English language given the heavy influence of the internet.<p>That said, evaluating change in the number of comments along with comment upvotes vs. sentiment analysis seems like the only logical way to demonstrate any sort of quality meta analysis. I'm not really versed in qualitative research, so here's my ASK HN: is this even possible?
I think what you are doing is challenging in the sense that you have made your goal to write a post that will go viral on HN. Remember, every story here, pretty much, is content from somewhere else. You are right that you aren't hitting your audience, but your audience isn't HN, its those reading your blog. If someone in your audience is also on HN then maybe they will find it relevant to post.<p>Writing to be a big story on HN is like betting a number in roulette. You had beginners luck at first, now its time to find a new game...
I've noticed that some submissions drop off the news feed like a rock, while other submissions of the same story posted just a few hours later can gather considerable discussion, with submission time being the only apparent variable.<p>This leads me to speculate that there may be an optimal submission time or times throughout the day. I'd like to see analytics that look at the variation in the average number of comments/upvotes for submissions (or some other metric) to see if this theory holds any weight.
Just a heads-up: your site works really poorly on mobile. The text column is too narrow, while the charts are too big, and their interactive features make it hard to scroll the page. They also don't work right (touching a chart seems to mess up the y axis labels), but the impediment to scrolling is more annoying. I only ever read HN on my iPhone, so this is an upvote you're not getting simply because of technical problems with your website.
These are excellent visualizations, I'm glad they put this together, showed it to the hn community while also demonstrating one of rj metrics use cases.<p>A note about the product. How do they differentiate themselves from other DW analytics companies like datameer? (<a href="http://www.datameer.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.datameer.com/</a>) I can tell they specialize in e-commerce, but couldn't any DW analytics service give you that AND more?
I have to shake my head in admiration. What a powerful story - to start with not one failure, but three failures, and then to use the <i>same tool you were trying to hock</i> in those failures to figure out why you failed...and then, remarkably (at least for me) succeed wildly.<p>At least in this case, your tool provided some very valuable insight.
Thanks to these metrics, I've cracked the HN code:<p>We should always publish our content on paulgraham.com<p>That's the takeaway of these metrics, right?
Wow, I'm number 10! I don't know if I should be happy that people like my stuff, or scared that I've spent so much time submitting and commenting on Hacker News this year...
As someone who'se mildly colorblind, a few of your charts were near impossible to read. Especially the bottom three lines in Average Score by Category. Just a heads up.