Tell HN: If your HN submission doesn't get any upvotes, don't worry about it

99 points

11 years ago

I've recently been seeing many comments on Hacker News complaining that their submissions don't receive any points. As a result, they believe that vote manipulation techniques such as begging friends for votes on social media and using sockpuppet accounts to counteract this injustice are justifiable and that "everyone's doing it". While blatant voting manipulation may be the status quo at a certain other startup-oriented link aggregator, it is never good because it breaks the integrity of the service.

However, the lack of upvotes is just how link aggregators work.

The goal of many HN posters is to hit the front page. If you've received 10 points, you'll probably have hit the front page. However, depending on time of submission, you have a 10% to 20% chance of hitting 10 points: http://i.imgur.com/MdUvMB9.png

That's low, even if your blog post or startup is the Next Big Thing.

However, what's the typical behavior for HN submissions? Here's a chart of the median points for HN submissions at each timeslot: http://i.imgur.com/SN5BuAJ.png

The median is either 1 (no upvotes) or 2 (just 1 upvote), which reinforces how the typical behavior of HN really is.

Yes, it's possible for submissions to slip through the cracks. HN allows resubmission of links if they haven't had any discussion (as long as you don't delete-then-resubmit to obfuscate the fact that it's a report). If your submission doesn't get points, submit again later.

(Code and data for the two charts are available in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/minimaxir/hn-heatmaps)

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