What determines whether a post gets visibility on Hacker News
Hi HN
I’ve been trying to share some of my blog posts and side projects here over the past months, but I’ve noticed that most of them get almost no visibility. They receive little to no upvotes, very few views, and sometimes no interaction at all. I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong, if my posts are being filtered, or if my content simply isn’t a good fit for the community.
I’d genuinely like to understand how Hacker News works from the perspective of people who have been here longer.
A bit about me: I’m an indie developer who builds products in public and writes technical posts about what I learn (frontend architecture, experiments, lessons from building apps, etc.). I’m not trying to spam or promote aggressively — I mostly want to share things I think other developers might find useful.
Some questions I’m hoping to get feedback on:
• Is there a common reason posts don’t get visibility even if they’re relevant? • Are there unwritten rules about how/when to submit content? • Is it better to post as “Show HN”, a normal link, or a text post? • Does the title matter more than the content at first? • Could account age/karma affect initial exposure?
I’m asking this not just for myself, but to turn the answers into a small guide for other indie hackers who might be struggling with the same thing.
I’d really appreciate honest feedback — even if the answer is simply: “Your posts aren’t interesting enough for HN.” That would still help me improve.
Thanks in advance I wouldn't try to focus too much on the alchemy that makes some posts turn into gold while others remain lead. I will say that I often click on the submitter's profile and if I see very low karma, or karma only related to their own submissions, then it makes me think that they're only on HN to promote themselves. Giving back (in the form of comments, feedback, etc) is an important part of what makes this community great. I understand, I guess I don't have much of a knack for commenting here. So I think I need to increase my karma score a bit. Posting nothing but links to your own blog is a classic rookie mistake. If you do that your posts are automatically [dead]. Post some links to somebody else's blog, write some comments, get your karma up to 100 or so. Very simply, be part of the community and not just here to extract attention. Turn on the "showdead" flag on your profile and you will get more insight into all the people who go straight to [dead]. Actually, I've noticed that there's a lot of hype here when some people share blog content. So the community is more interested in what others recommend than in personal posts. I understand. It's more that a personal post may or may not be interesting to even one other person, but a post that somebody else recommended was interesting to at least one other person. And that's a big gap! I just checked and saw that my posts weren't flagged with "dead" :) That's good.