The Autodidacts

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How to get your "How to get your blog post on the front page of HN" blog post on the front page of HN

Posted by Curiositry on Tagged Essay, Humour, Hot Air, Satire, Fiction

I once got a blogpost on frontpage of HackerNews. Therefore, I am kind of a leading expert on how to get blogposts on frontpage of HackerNews. In this post I will humbly share my secret recipe for winning the internet.

  1. Write blogpost. Blogpost must be very awesome. Only best blogposts make frontpage of HackerNews. My post was of course very best awesome blogpost, which is why my blogpost made front page of HackerNews.

  • Brainstorm clickbait title that doesn’t seem like clickbait. Try "Seven Lessons in Humility from A Leading Expert", or "Everything Sucks", or "Your Framework is More Stupid Than My Framework". Remember, HackerNews readers are very very smart, and can smell marketing from miles away: growth-hackers must approach from downwind.

  • Pick your timing. Timing is everything. Submit your blogpost ten arcseconds after the full moon on Walpurgis Night or expect total failure. This is the most likely time to get on frontpage of HackerNews, according to Science.

  • Submit. After much trial and error I followed my system exactly and submitted my blogpost at Unix time 1654138437 from my Commodore 64 running DOS. As expected, my blogpost was loved by everyone and made very top of HackerNews. I was very surprised and delighted that my blogpost unexpectedly made very top of HackerNews. What luck! #blessed

  • Profit! Capture leads. Make sales. Convert like crazy with ultra-tapered funnel. Make splashpage for HN users offering 24 karat bitcoins in exchange for upvotes. Write followup post about getting banned from HackerNews and submit that to Hacker News too.

  • Postmortem. I grew my growth-hacking list by 8.96 million subscribers, with a 1000% conversion rate. I expected to do better but that’s still epic growth of my popular newsletter.

Here is pretty graph of how many people read and loved my post:
HN Traffic Spike Cartoon

Here is picture of my server literally on fire:

Server Fire

Here is heroic action shot of me scaling my Kubernetes:

Image of heroic rescue of Kubernetes container disaster.
Photo: Maritime New Zealand
Gif that doesn’t relate to the article in any way, but is weird and or funny and may relieve bordom.

Here is a famous person’s tweet about my blogpost:

It was okay. — @marktwain

Lots of insightful discussion on HackerNews:

Snarky HN comment screenshot: “Vague headline that leads to a navel-gazing self-congratulatory blogpost. The Y Combinator equivalent of clickbait, meant to reassure the headline reader that they’re intelligent and important. Kudos!”

  • Conclusion If you’re wondering how I got my blogpost on frontpage of HackerNews, so am I. IDK, luck? I honestly have no idea. But if you follow my five-step plan exactly you too can get your blogpost on very top of world-famous link aggregator!!!

I’m not allowed to ask you to upvote my submission (hint hint) but don’t forget to comment and subscribe, okay? And if you want to load-test your lexical parser (and possibly turn your brain into a puddle resembling my server after I went totally viral on HackerNews) stay tuned for my upcoming viral exploding harpoon blogpost, How to get your "How to get your "How to get your blog post on the front page of HN" blog post on the front page of HN" blog post on the frontpage of HN.