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Ask HN: Will Hacker News Get An Official "Show HN" Section?
I've just recently joined Hacker News and I think it is a great community, however there is one flaw. While browsing through the "Ask HN" section, I find nearing half of the entries to be "Show HN". I think there are so many people who are now "showing" things to HN, it deserves its own section up top. Does anyone else share this opinion?
- cadalac 12y agoThe "ask HN" section is usually very informative and useful, ie. dealing with problems, finding work, recommending products etc. I'm not sure a "show HN" section would have the same overall value for the community.
- tronium 12y agoI agree, especially that the "Ask HN" section is more valuable. However, the people who post "Show HN" posts will appear in Ask HN, making it cluttered. I'm essentially asking for a bit more organization.
- hadoukenio 12y ago> I'm not sure a "show HN" section would have the same overall value for the community. Last I heard HN was a community of people who build things. A separate "Show HN" section would allow you know... people to show what they are building. Extend this further, the homepage should be defaulted to "Show HN" and all the rest put onto "other" pages!
- canthonytucci 12y agoI think a third party can aggregate these and that would be enough. Personally, I like that HN is a single page to visit (more or less) with occasional ShowHN items appearing, I like seeing them, but would be less likely to visit a separate section......if they appeared in both I guess that would be ok.
- Turing_Machine 12y agoAgree and disagree. The Show HN posts rank very high on my personal scale of "interesting stuff". I'm not sure I would agree with them being the only thing on the front page, though. There's a lot of other interesting stuff here as well.
- DanBlake 12y agoIt would be very valuable to newly launching companies to get feedback
- cschmidt 12y agoI would love that. I've been working on my startup for over two years, and my "Show HN" post last week didn't get a single upvote. I was really disappointed. I think the Show HN section would provide more visibility.
- dewey 12y agoMaybe your timing was a bit unlucky but from what I observed over time it's better to submit a direct link and then add the description as a comment. Don't make people search for the link in the description and copy paste that into their browser url bar (Even if you commented with the direct links).
- nilkn 12y agoTry producthunt.com. It doesn't quite have the popularity of HN but the flip-side is there's a higher chance of visibility.
- machosx 12y agoI know how you feel...
- ThomPete 12y ago
- opendais 12y agoI think that a Show HN section is a good idea. However, I'd strongly suggest it is more like a subreddit than just a filter to only show 'Show HN' posts if possible. It would encourage people to use it but keeping it separate might keep it from overwhelming the more relevant content.
- superbaconman 12y agoI remember when there was at least one Show HN post a day, sometimes 3 or 4 on the front page... Those were the days when products and projects were the relevant content. I don't know what anyone in this community works on anymore. I miss seeing people do things.
- opendais 12y agoAnd you'd have entire page of Show HN posts one click away. :)
- jcfrei 12y agothere are a couple of community run webpages that filter Show HN posts. Ie. http://showinghn.com/ http://showinghn.com/ Or on twitter: https://twitter.com/ShowHNDaily https://twitter.com/ShowHNDaily
- seanewest 12y agoThis very thread turned up on ShowHNDaily because of the "Show HN" in the title. ...thinks like that hold back unofficial filters.
- brudgers 12y agoThis thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 is for feature requests. There is a link to it at the bottom of most pages on HN.
- Arjuna 12y agoAccording to dang, the short answer is Yes. This is dang's response to a similar question, approximately 23 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739559 In the same thread, I wrote up some "in the mean-time" search examples that can help surface "Show HN" submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7738243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7738243
- spacemanmatt 12y agoFor the duration and focus of my average HN interaction, more compartmentalization of the content here will mean I read less. Or maybe I'll only read default compartments. Be careful what you ask for.
- kapkapkap 12y agoThe root of the problem is that with the current setup, theres a huge 'luck factor' into whether or not your Show HN post most makes it off of 'New' and onto the first page. Its often 1 or 2 votes that can mean the difference between a post reaching the front page where it can then go on to recieve double/triple digit upvotes, versus remaining on 'New' and only getting 2-3 votes (in which case someone searching 'Show HN' thinks to themself 'well that post must not be very good, since it has so few votes'. Of course the same could be said about news articles, however people dont spend hundreds of hours writing a news article (in fact it's rarely even the poster's work at all). While it would certainly be unwise to rely on a Show HN post as the sole means to launch your project, it certainly one of the top 5 traffic generators when you are just getting off the ground, and it sucks when your thread falls into obscurity because you didnt get that one extra vote to move you off of 'New' onto the first page.
- hkmurakami 12y agoThat's why the "smart" thing for someone to do is to game the system, either through ring voting, asking friends to upvote on twitter. I can't blame them, thigh it's technically a bit borderline. I guess it's more legit for show hn than blogspam though.
- opendais 12y agoThat is why HN has a voting ring detector. :p
- hkmurakami 12y agoI really think that if you have a group of friends who are regular participants of HN, the ringvoting detector doesnt come into play. (not that I've tried) But maybe it's "okay" if the people are actually regulars? Hard to say since I'm not a mod here.
- woah 12y agoIn my experience, it doesn't work well.
- edavis 12y agoFWIW, I think there should be. Always seemed a bit odd seeing Ask and Show posts merged together like that. In case anyone's interested, I've put together a project [1] that generates a "Show HN" RSS feed here: http://hnrss.org/feeds/showhn.xml http://hnrss.org/feeds/showhn.xml [1] https://github.com/edavis/hnrss https://github.com/edavis/hnrss
- mountainair 12y agoYou're not alone! In fact, it's so tricky to sort through the Show/Ask HN archives that I don't often use HN when I want to browse new projects, I use producthunt.com
- joeblau 12y ago+1 on this. It would be like Product Hunt for the HN community.
- detcader 12y agoI personally like the non-forced feel of how it works now, though I agree luck is a factor. If it were "official," gaming will start instantly and the value of the meme drops (as with most things). People start fights like "I'm tired of seeing ____ in the Show HN section"; it takes the natural flexibility out of the whole thing. Once you introduce incentives for gaming (the 1.0 probability that many people, including people with money, will see your link) and create a sectioned-off social space, it becomes a whole different social dynamic. Maybe just have a link at the top bar/somewhere else to one of the websites other commentors have mentioned that feature all ShowHN projects.
- andywood 12y agoAnd, will it get a never time out and eat my long form essay i painstakingly wrote on the bus... section?
- andywood 12y agoAnd, will it get a never time out and eat my long form essay i painstakingly wrote on the bus... section?
- dang 12y agoYep, it definitely will! This has been on our list for a long time and I'm hopeful we'll get to it soon. I'm going to bury this thread now. Questions like this are better sent to hn@ycombinator.com.