I was recently chatting with a friend who wanted to reach more software developers. I recalled some of the advice I gave him in my latest post at LinkedIn, which I’ve republished below:

I’ve hit the front page of Hacker News 10+ times for Figma and other companies, and picked up five tactics along the way:

1. A post has a good shot if it picks up 10 to 15 upvotes in its first 30 minutes. I’ve seen advice suggesting 5 or 6 upvotes in the first five to ten minutes, but that feels risky to me. A big announcement from Anthropic or OpenAI might pull that kind of traffic on its own. A regular blog post from a less high profile company is usually slower. 

2. If you’re going to ask friends to upvote, don’t send them the direct URL. Make sure each person actually uses Hacker News regularly, not just for this one favor. Have them go to /newest and search for your title with cmd+F. Make sure they’re not all on the same Wi-Fi network, use personal hotspots instead. I actually prefer asking friends to upvote a couple of unrelated posts they like as well.

3. If they leave comments, the comments should sound like Hacker News comments: well considered, and slightly critical. Nothing screams a shadowban like a low effort, “Great work!” comment.

Do any of this too often, or make it too obvious, and your account or domain can get shadowbanned. After your account or domain is shadowbanned, your posts will be invisible to anyone browsing. You will receive no votes or comments. You can email the moderators and plead your case, but I’d imagine the things that got you banned in the first place tend to make that a hard case to plead. (I have never had to try to rescue a domain.)

4. For my own blog, where I write every day, I post to Hacker News at odd hours, like 9pm ET. If it doesn’t take off right away, a moderator sometimes picks it up for the second-chance pool.

5. For every post about yourself, submit nine good posts from other people. This ratio keeps you from being too self-promotional, and it refines your taste for what the community actually wants.

Real traction looks messy from the outside. If you check a website’s post history on Hacker News, most of its submissions sit at 1 to 3 points, even for more popular websites. A post at 20 or 30 points stands out. A history where every post lands at 20 or 30 points looks suspicious.

My first submission on behalf of Figma did not hit Hacker News directly. It hit the top of the r/programming Subreddit first. Then four different people found it there and submitted it to Hacker News over the next couple of days, and one of those hit the front page. I didn’t know them or ask anyone to do that.

A good article can hit the front page with none of these tactics. But executing all of them perfectly won’t save an article that isn’t any good.

If you’ve got a good technical article or eng blog that doesn’t have enough readers, let me know. I can help you assess whether it’s the content that’s the problem (and how to fix it), or help you find more readers.

I’ve shared most of that advice before here. I also wrote the prequel to this one a few weeks ago, when I wrote about hitting the front page of Hacker News for Figma during its annual conference. 

A lot of people are executing these types of campaigns behind the scenes—with really good content, of course—to great success. It feels fair to open this possibility up to everyone.

While I led with the promotional tips, they tend to distract away from how to write something actually worth sharing. The subject matter being shared is 80% of the work. The distribution can help unlock a good article’s impact, but it means nothing if the article wasn’t worth reading to begin with. That’ll probably be the subject of my next post.

For this blog, I don’t ask friends to upvote at all. I just submit a post and close the tab. Seven of these blog posts have hit the front page completely organically. It feels a lot more rewarding knowing that these posts thrived on their own, without me needing to give it an extra promotional boost. Plus, I know which ideas resonate, and what to explore further.