Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Basic mechanics and norms

  • HN is repeatedly described as “just a discussion forum”: you submit links or text, people upvote, downvote, flag, or ignore, and a conversation may or may not emerge.
  • Clear titles and use of prefixes like Show HN, Ask HN, Tell HN, plus suffixes like [PDF], [video], [1995] are encouraged.
  • Politics and religion are seen as topics that quickly devolve; obvious promotion and reposts are frowned upon.
  • Self-promotion is acceptable only when secondary to genuine, substantive contribution. Overt “btw subscribe to my newsletter” signatures are controversial.

Curiosity vs promotion (mod explanation)

  • A moderator explains the core principle: HN is “optimized for intellectual curiosity.”
  • Things that get elevated: creative work, deep dives, technical achievements, unusual experiences, whimsical or surprising items, and good conversations.
  • Things that get demoted: repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and especially promotion.
  • Approaching HN as a distribution or marketing channel (“growth lever”) is framed as fundamentally misaligned with the site; it makes the site unintelligible to you.

Ranking, timing, and randomness

  • The ranking algorithm is simple: more votes → higher; older → lower; moderator penalties reduce score. Very contentious threads are penalized.
  • Early upvotes from people watching /new are critical; there’s also a “second chance” pool for promising posts that initially died.
  • Time of day and weekday matter (e.g., mid-morning US Pacific is cited), and there’s acknowledged randomness: the same link can fail twice and hit big the third time.
  • Snowball and title effects are strong: high-score posts attract more scrutiny and upvotes; good content with weak titles often sinks.

Gaming, levers, and spam

  • Many insist “there are no levers” in any useful, repeatable sense; attempts to game HN are quickly spotted and punished, sometimes with bans.
  • Others argue every community has levers: framing Ask HN posts around your product, “nerd sniping” with technical issues, or coordinated off-site upvotes are cited as possible tactics.
  • There’s mention of a cottage industry of marketers trying to optimize for HN, but consensus is that HN is “hard mode” compared to other platforms; value-added, non-obvious marketing sometimes slips through.

What tends to resonate

  • Novel, nerdy, and effortful work: reverse engineering, post-mortems, systems internals, retro/infra history, odd museums/archives, biological or mathematical curiosities.
  • Clear, non-marketing language, technical detail, and personal experience.
  • Show HN can work very well, but many “Show HN” launches end up in a graveyard; HN love does not imply a real business.

Critiques and tensions

  • Some see more repetition, outrage, AI/“enshittification” rants, and YC/YC-company influence than before.
  • Debate over accessibility: some call the site unusable for assistive tech; others using screen readers say it’s imperfect but workable.
  • There’s frustration that controversial or non-mainstream views can quickly be downvoted, and that HN is opaque or “curated” in ways not fully documented.
  • Yet many argue its resistance to algorithmic engagement tricks and blatant growth-hacking is exactly why it remains valuable.