Hacker News Front Page Guide

All you need to know to get on the Hacker News Front Page!

This guide is a collection of best practices and insights I’ve researched across the web, sanity-checked by my own experience of hitting the Hacker News front page.

The tips are targeted at people wanting to use HN for promoting their own content or products. While HN is not primarily meant to be a marketing platform, but a community of people interested in certain topics, it can give your content/products a huge visibility boost when presented in a way that’s appropriate for the HN community.

This guide describes best practices for how (and when) to submit your content so that it will be well received by the HN audience.

Benefits of this guide:

• Based on research combined with first-hand experience of getting on the front page.
• Includes all references to sources of data and information.
• No fluff: A short and simple guide to not waste your time.

Researching the contained info yourself will cost you several days. Take the shortcut with this guide and put your valuable time towards improving your product or content.

Topics covered:

• What content works on Hacker News?
• What’s the best way to post, i.e., which type of submission works best?
• What’s the best time to post on Hacker News?
• What formatting options are there?
• How do upvotes work?
• How does the Hacker News algorithm work?
• Does Karma matter?
• Can I ask my friends to boost the post?
• Am I allowed to re-submit my post?
• How many posts make it to the front page?
• What’s the potential return / effect of being on the front page?