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independenceone source · 1 more author in those circles
standing

contested · 1 claims against 1

applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

mixed results

confidence

medium

evidence

2 claims · 2 articles · 2 receipts

window

2012-10-08 → 2023-12-22

a single source, nothing corroborates it · contested

Expect the throwaway post to travel furthest

Effort and reach are barely related here. A few hours of ranting about something many readers already felt reached the top and around ten thousand people, while the argued advice its author was proudest of went nowhere. The counter reading is that posts teaching something usable are what get rewarded, and opinion pieces get read for the fight rather than the idea.

Where this splits

One builder's quick rant beat his most carefully argued writing, while another found teaching posts won and opinion pieces reached the front page for the wrong reasons.

1 claims against 1

Cory Zue

The quick rant outperforms your most careful writing

  1. 01The piece that travels is rarely the piece you worked hardest on: a fast rant on a feeling many readers share can outperform your most carefully argued advice by orders of magnitude.
the objection · 1 claimNathan Barry

Aggregators reward posts that teach something usable

Aggregator audiences reward posts that teach something usable and punish opinion pieces about your industry, even when the opinion piece gets attention

What it returned

  • 10,000

    Zue's few-hour rant on authenticity reached the top of Hacker News and around 10,000 readers, while the hard-won entrepreneurship advice he was proudest of got very little attention; 76 hours of writing that year produced three posts he rates as okay.

  • Sacha's rant about ugly programming language sites reached the front page for the wrong reasons, while a curated list of good web fonts and a post on the higher support costs of cheap customers did well

Sources

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.

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More in hacker news

all hacker news plays

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.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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