a single source, nothing corroborates it
Do not plan on reaching the front page twice
A number one placement often turns on a contentious premise in the headline and on whatever else happened to be trending that day, rather than on the writing. One post took hundreds of votes in fifteen hours for reasons its author could not reproduce on demand. Treat a hit as a windfall, not as a channel you can schedule.
The method
- 01
A front-page hit on Hacker News is mostly luck and mostly a reaction to your headline's premise rather than the article, so do not build a plan around repeating it.
What it returned
- 372
Zue's post on Django with HTMX and Alpine reached number one with 372 upvotes and 208 comments in fifteen hours; he attributes it to a contentious claim about building modern sites without JavaScript and to another HTMX post trending the same day.
Sources
- Holy Crap!Cory Zue · coryzue.com · Publish “Modern JavaScript for Django Developers” Part 5: A+ · 2021-12-02
the second source
Three plays a week, for the phase you are in
No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.
More in hacker news
- Bank the front page wave as reputation, not revenue2 unconnected
- Test the idea there, then distrust the verdict2 unconnected · contested
- Answer the question first, name the tool second2 unconnected
- Keep showing up long after your launch day2 unconnected
- Plan the front page spike as reach, not signupssingle source
- Publish your own numbers in unglamorous detailsingle source