HACKER Q&A
📣 roberdam

Made it to the HN frontpage?, what was the impact it had?


Recently I had my second HN frontpage with all the perks attached: the huge spike on visits, the exposure on other media, and the peer comments & suggestions.

But since, in both posts I was not selling anything I can't really quantify or put a number on how much impact a HN frontpage could have in other aspects apart from the exposure.

This is a 10 year post from DHH with comments from Pg but I can't find nothing newer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3680018

Care to share your experience here?


  👤 austin-cheney Accepted Answer ✓
Under a different (now abandoned) account I made to the front page for the entirety of a day to about 350 upvotes. I wrote a new more accurate diff algorithm with a hacky backup for missed cases. The result was about 50,000 visits to my website and about 30,000 the next day.

👤 henrik_w
I have nothing to sell, just blogging because it is interesting, and (perhaps) "brand building". I can't say I have seen any impact at all really, except that it is satisfying that people like what I write.

I have had around 25 posts hitting the front page:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...


👤 achairapart
I guess it's not about mere numbers (unless you're selling some kind of commodity, where volume matters most), but - given the audience - more likely a chance to connect with the right people at the right moment.

👤 speedgoose
Once, an article about some of my work reached the top. I got rightfully destroyed in the comments because of one major mistake I did.