A couple of years ago, I met a CEO of a series A startup. At the time, I was working as a content strategist on Figma’s marketing team, where I also found an informal role as the in-house Hacker News expert. At the time, Figma was expanding outside of its core design audience, and into new segments including developers. I helped several technical posts reach the Hacker News front page, including this post from Figma’s databases team (credits from the authoring staff engineer here). As we chatted about Hacker News, the CEO laughed, “Every team needs a Hacker News whisperer.” 

Indeed. Hacker News feels like one of the last places on the internet with a semblance of sanity and reality, thanks to its devoted community and many mechanisms devised to catch spam. In many ways, it’s the gold standard, especially in the technical community. 

I signed up for Hacker News five years ago, and I’ve been really enjoying participating. I often submit posts from this blog that hit the front page, and many on behalf of friends as well (because I like their writing, not because they asked). 

I wanted to write this because I know many people are interested in hitting the front page, and I wanted to share some lessons learned and suggest some useful ways for thinking about it. 

The main purpose of this post is to encourage people to spend less time gaming the system, and more time writing articles worthy of hitting the front page. Here are a few of the lessons I have learned along the way:

1. Write articles that deserve to hit the Hacker News front page

The front page of Hacker News is a great place to be, for all sorts of reasons (awareness, clout, etc). There is a great sense of validation that comes from your smart friends saying, “Wow, are you on the front page of HN?!” 

With the audience at Hacker News—people who enjoy hacking—some degree of hacking Hacker News is to be expected. There are even people who write about how they try to game the front page (here are some examples).

Still, to me, the most surefire way to hit the front page of Hacker News is to make something that deserves it. This is necessary, but not sufficient. The XKCD comic, “Constructive,” best describes this in spirit. Nobody will be mad about learning something new and useful, even if you hacked your way to the front page.

What’s a good definition of worthy? My approach is relatively intuitive; I read or skim something, and if I like it, I post it. If I like something I wrote, I post it. I’m aware this topic deserves its own post and I’ll need to write it another time. Here’s a useful starting point though. 

2. Ask for an initial boost, occasionally

When you submit a post, it’s a well known secret that getting several friends to upvote it will improve its odds of hitting the front page. If you want to try this, aiming for 15 people in 30 minutes can work. Try asking people who regularly use Hacker News. 

There are many tricks to this, which you can research on your own (this is a good starting point!), but at the end of the day, this is only an initial boost: in my experience, if the post doesn’t deserve to hit the front page, it will get flagged and removed, or it will drop off very quickly. Worse yet, your post loses trust and may get your account or URL flagged. So, if you must do this, do it only when you feel a strong conviction about an article.

The final destination of submitting to Hacker News is not needing to do it for self promotional purposes. GitLab’s policy is a good example of this, “Never submit GitLab content to Hacker News. Submission gets more credibility if a non-GitLab Hacker News community member posts it, we should focus on making our posts interesting instead of on submitting it.” (See the first rule!)

A skeptic might suggest that GitLab only got to this place by originally self posting, even occasionally, enough that the community follows them and posts independently. (That’s probably why there’s a rule!) This level of focus on writing is something to aspire to, but not very useful for companies and people who don’t have a following yet. 

Something to keep in mind: if your URL is constantly hitting the front page, that doesn’t look very organic. For example, look at the submissions from GitLab; many posts only have 2 to 3 votes, and most did not hit the front page.

Again: Do this very sparingly, if ever. For example, even though I submit my own posts from this blog, I never ask for upvotes. That’s because I want to see which ideas genuinely resonate with the community.

3. For every post about yourself, submit nine good posts from other people

If you’re going to promote your own work, do it only after you’ve submitted nine other posts. Simon Willison gets away with posting his own stuff often, but he seems to be the exception. This is a useful rule for not being too self promotional at Hacker News.

I submit some incredible articles and most do not hit the front page. This is very sobering. It takes the right time and right place. So hitting the front page isn’t always a reflection of your work. 

This sets a reasonable expectation for your submissions. It also develops your intuitive sense of what the community likes, and deserves to hit the front page—as well as how many deserving posts don’t, just because it wasn’t the right time.

4. Give your submission a second chance

Hacker News has a second chance pool, which gives good submissions a second chance to hit the front page. Again, this only works if your article deserves to hit the front page.

Another way to give your post a second chance is to submit it to other forums where the Hacker News community hangs out. For example, if your post hits the front page of the r/programming Subreddit, readers who liked it may submit it to HN, which in effect creates multiple submissions on your behalf. 

This happened to me when I submitted a Figma post to r/programming, and it felt like receiving multiple lottery tickets instead of just one—which improved our odds of hitting the front page.

5. Write good comments, and turn them into posts

Once, I saw a post related to my book’s topic hit the front page of Hacker News. I wrote a comment which resonated, so I suggested that my publishers excerpt the relevant parts of my book into a post. My publisher did that, submitted to Hacker news, and that submission hit the front page. 

I actually think you can take this further: submit an already existing article related to a topic you want to write about, and if that blows up, then use it as an occasion to research what the community thinks as well as write useful comments. Take stock of the most resonant ones and turn those into posts.

Those are the lessons! It’s pretty difficult to game the system, so I have given up trying; instead, this is the advice I offer. I hope that you realize that you’ll need to at least pretend to be a participant at Hacker News. My now not-so-secret hope is you pretend your way into actually becoming a good member of the community in the process.