When I worked as a content strategist on Figma’s marketing team, I also found an informal role as the in-house Hacker News expert. I helped several technical posts reach HN’s front page, including this post from Figma’s databases team (credits from the authoring staff engineer here). I often submit posts from this blog that hit 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). And with the audience it draws in—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).

The best way to hack Hacker News is to make something that deserves to hit the front page. The XKCD comic, “Constructive,” best describes this in spirit. Nobody will be mad about that, even if you hacked your way to the front page.

2. Ask for an initial boost, occasionally

When you submit it, it’s a public secret that getting several friends to upvote it will improve its odds of hitting the front page. I aim for 15 people in 30 minutes. 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.

Remember, 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 practical person might suggest that GitLab only got to this place by getting submitted a lot (and they might imagine many of those submissions were self posted), enough that the community follows them and posts independently. I think it’s something to aspire to, not very useful for companies and people who don’t have a following yet.

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. 

Do this very sparingly, if ever. For example, even though I submit my own posts from this blog, I never ask for upvotes. 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 a lot more often, but you and I are not Simon.

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 work. 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 post a second chance

Hacker News has a second chance pool, which gives good posts 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 HN community hangs out. For example, if your post hits the front page of the r/programming Subreddit, people may submit it to HN which creates multiple posts. This happened to me when I was submitting a post for Figma, 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 of mine 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.