Ask HN: Is there a best time of day to post on HN?
Out of curiosity, has anyone found a sweet spot in the time of day to make a post? Like where the site hits it's peak traffic during the day/night. There's a definitive answer here (hooray, data!): http://nathanael.hevenet.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker... Nice post mate, good information! It obviously depends on site activity and thus varies each day, but usually around 7~8am and 5~6pm eastern times work well. I wrote a little app that tracks this for you: http://hnnotify.leknarf.net/. The graph is slow to load, just wait a little while. I wrote a more detailed blog post that explains how this works, but the core concept is as follows. Assuming you want your HN submission to reach the front page, then it’s important to post at times when scores on the new page are relatively high compared to the front page. This assumes your goal is to reach the front page. I don’t actually know how many people skim over the ‘new’ links, but it’s fairly obvious that a far greater number of people only look at the first 30 links on the home page. For the purposes of discussion, I’m going to assume a very simplistic model of the HN front page: new stories with more points will outrank older stories with less points. That is, I’m ignoring any effects existing karma has on a user’s submission and any factors related to when a story gets upvotes. If we assume that a new story needs to get more points than an existing story in order to replace it on the front page, then the following is straightforward:
- It’s a good time to submit when scores on the front page are low. If the lowest-ranked story has 10 points, it will be much easier to replace than if the lowest-ranked story has 100 points.
- It’s a good time to post when scores on the new page are high. If the highest-ranked story on the new page only has 2 points, it doesn’t seem likely that your submission will fare much better. http://leknarf.net/blog/2013/03/13/find-out-when-to-post-on-... While there are statistically better and worse times, stories which suck still suck and even the best stories require luck to gain traction. For me, I make submissions when I find something interesting rather than trending. Whatever moderate traction those stories receive tends to come from submitting at off peak times - weekends and late night US time. But the first criteria are always the relevance of the article and quality. I'm on the east coast here. Most active part of the day for me is around 10am, where most people are awake here, and the west coast is just waking up. I'm guessing that most people check HN first thing in the morning. Not I, but I haven't really thought about there being a sweet spot ever before. This is something I'd like to know too though. Please ask Google before asking HN; it's been answered many times. "Ask" should be a way to initiate interesting discussions, not meta-discussion about effectively gaming the site. From what I have observed, the best time would be at 11pm EST. 9 to 10 AM EST