Today I browsed to Hacker News as I do every day and noticed a front page post on "How I Made $6,000 in 7 Days with my Ebook." A friend of mine, Jeremy Olson, has a similar success story. Jeremy and his partner Nathan Barry wrote "The App Design Handbook" and pulled in $36,297 in the first 24 hours and over $56,000 in the first month. He posted these earnings on Twitter at which point I urged him to write up a blog post regarding his success. Jeremy replied with the following disheartening tweet:<p><pre><code> "@cballou kind of like this? [url redacted]
That actually hit HN homepage but the mods
took it down :("
</code></pre>
He also followed up our conversation with:<p><pre><code> "@cballou yeah, actually we’ve had several posts taken
off the front page. Don’t get it"
</code></pre>
My question to the HN community, and particularly the mods, is WTFMATE?<p>Jeremy is a well respected member of the community with an Apple Design Award under his belt. He has a substantial following in the iOS community and my initial inclination is that him sharing the blog post led to upvotes which triggered flagging/deleting his post. I believe that in the case of a post deemed to be as beneficial to the community as this one, you'd realize it's likely not upvote gaming but true interest.<p>I'll follow up with links to the Twitter conversation and the original article that was removed.
<i>Unjustly</i>? The front page is automated: it is not a human entity. It has no notion of fairness or justice.<p>Do you understand all of the technical reasons why posts are penalized off the front page? Do you have improvements to the ranking? Or is this merely a rant? Sometimes things get unfortunately demoted. Life goes on.
Seeing as the original story was posted over a month ago timing definitely is a factor. There's nothing unjust about it, timing [or luck if you like] plays a role. That's just the way HN works.<p>ALL-CAPS in the recent submission may have played a role - it's the sort of thing which might trigger a spam filter.<p>More importantly, the statement that "several posts" were taken off the front page lends itself to the possibility that some of the posts did not make the front page organically - i.e. the complaint is consistent with using standard social media promotional techniques on HN.
Here's the accompanying Twitter conversation that led to me posting:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/jerols/status/408977497255337984" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jerols/status/408977497255337984</a><p>Here's the initial blog post that was removed:<p>$36,297 IN 24 HOURS: BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE APP DESIGN HANDBOOK LAUNCH<p><a href="http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-stats/" rel="nofollow">http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-stats/</a>
My view is that PG base given us a place to call attention to things that you think might be interesting to other folks. While it is nice to get some validation that others agree with you, I don't think that should be the aim of the poster.
Instead I think one should post to HN as a charitable act and not whine if you or your post doesn't get the attention you think it deserves. IMO, it is a gift to the community not a "look at me" opportunity.
Here's the highest upvoted version of it:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6712226" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6712226</a><p>It seems to have been submitted a few times in short succession:<p><a href="https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%2436%2C297+IN+24+HOURS" rel="nofollow">https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%2436%2C297+IN...</a><p>It's possible that the original submission just wasn't noticed, so a couple of submitters tried resubmitting it, and a wary mod treated it as spam.