How to Start with HN?

Question

After a several month of regularly reading the top HN post, I decided to finally create an account and post my own awesome link to HN. However, it seems like the post new made it public. It is still listed under my submissions, but when I am not logged in, I cannot find the post. I now read several articles, explaining the karma system, guidelines and strategies someone can use to push your post, but it is still quite confusing (i.e. Karma is connected to the success of your posts. But what does "post" actually mean? Does this also include comments? What are the main thinks I need to know before I start posting to HN?). So many questions and nobody I know, who I could ask. Maybe the community can help me?

dusted · Accepted Answer

I see that you posted one 17 hours ago, looks like a commercial site.
When you first post your link, it appear on /newest if you post at a busy time it might fall off the first page of /newest very fast.
However, if your post gains enough tracking (comments/upvotes) it goes to the front page.
Most people have lots of links with no votes at all. Don't expect your link to make it to frontpage.
You gain karma when people interact positively with your content (submissions and comments) you lose it when people react negatively (downvoting, probably flagging). You lose more from a downvote than you get for an upvote.

viraptor · Answer

Your post seems to have been auto-hidden. Same as this one. It sucks, but try contacting the admins though the "contact" link in the footer. I vouched for both submissions - not sure if that helps with the future postings.

mindcrime · Answer

It seems that over the years HN has gotten a little more "restrictive" I guess you could say, around new accounts. The reasons for that seem fairly obvious, eg, spam. I think a lot of people mistake HN primarily as a platform for promoting their own commercial sites. So the mods seem to have implemented more rules to make it less attractive for people to just show up, create an account, and start pushing self-promotional stuff.
The thing is self-promotion is allowed on HN, even explicitly so (see: Show HN). But that's not, as I understand it, how the powers that be want people to primarily conceptualize HN. First and foremost, it's a platform for, um, what's the phrase, "satisfying your intellectual curiosity" or whatever. The self-promotional stuff is a side-bar to that, not the headline on the marquee sign so to speak.
Net-net... you have a new account, your thing got auto-flagged or whatever. The solution, as others have pointed out, is just to email the mods (and/or hope somebody will "vouch" for your post, which apparently they did). Beyond that, make sure to read the site guidelines[1] and FAQ[2]. Most of what you need to know is there.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

the_only_law · Answer

Certain new accounts seem to be shadow banned by default. I&rsquo;m not sure exactly why, but I&rsquo;ve seen this behavior occasionally with throwaway accounts. If someone vouches you post, I believe it will show.

moistly · Answer

It appears that you do not want to participate in the &ldquo;community&rdquo; component of HN by contributing your knowledge and insights through active discussion, you wish only to extract eyeballs from HN to benefit your pet blockchain project. And then you ask the community to help you claim those precious eyeballs, though you have contributed literally nothing to the community.It&rsquo;s an audacious plan, I&rsquo;ll grant you that.

Jaruzel · Answer

In short, contribute to the community by posting comments that get voted up. Once you pass a certain Karma threshold value, and I'm not going to explicitly state what that is, start posting interesting submissions.