How to Get Customers from Hacker Newswithout setting off its allergy to marketing

HN's FAQ states the mechanic plainly: “The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.” Points age out, so fifteen upvotes in the first hour beat forty over two days, and a submission either moves early or not at all.

Other things push it around — “user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action”. One thing does not: asked whether high-karma users rank higher, the FAQ answers “No.” There is no reputation to bank that makes your next post travel further.

Every submission lands on the new page first, where a handful of people read it and decide its fate inside an hour. Show HN and Ask HN posts get their own new lists, “but there is a small points threshold before a post makes it to ask or show.” Accept the implication before you spend a week preparing a launch: most submissions get nothing, including good ones.

HN asks readers to flag: “If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.” Enough flags and a post shows as [flagged] — “Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN” — or [dead], “killed by software, user flags, or moderators.” No moderator has to notice you for a marketing-flavoured submission to vanish, which is the mechanism behind every story about HN being brutal: not a jury, just a few hundred people with a flag link.

• Show HN is for things people can try. It has its own guidelines, and it is the only sanctioned way to post your own product.
• Ask HN “lists questions and other text submissions” — including the “what do you use for X” threads that are the most convertible surface on the site.
• A “Who Is Hiring?” thread appears on the first weekday of each month, and it is the only place job ads belong: “Please don't post job ads as submissions to HN.”
• Reposts are allowed sparingly — “If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok.”

The closest thing HN has to a buying question: somebody has described their situation in detail and asked a technical audience what to use. Everyone answering is naming tools, so naming yours — with the disclosure and the honest limits — is exactly what the thread asked for. These keep converting long after they close, because they are the pages people find when they later search the same question.

A postmortem about the failure mode you prevent, a story about the category, a heated thread about the thing everyone still does by hand. Nobody asked for a recommendation, which is the point: a comment substantively about the problem, with your product mentioned once and only where relevant, reads as a practitioner talking rather than a vendor arriving. Most of the sustained return lives here, and it is the least visible category from outside — which is why it is worth monitoring for.

Someone announcing, complaining about, or comparing a tool in your category. You are the least credible voice there, and the only way to be worth reading is to be genuinely fair, including about where they are better. HN's comment guidelines set the bar: “Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.” A dismissive comment about a rival costs you more standing than the rival loses.

Lead with the specific technical thing you know: the number, the constraint, the approach that failed, the reason the obvious solution breaks at scale. Mention what you build at the end, in one sentence, and only when it answers the question. A comment that is 90% substance and 10% product reads as expertise; the same content reversed reads as an ad and gets flagged. The site's own framing is that self-promotion is fine as a minority activity.

Worth stating precisely, because this is where secondhand advice goes wrong: Hacker News's guidelines contain no affiliation-disclosure rule, unlike Quora, which has an explicit one. What HN has instead is a community that flags undisclosed vendor comments.

Disclose anyway, in the comment itself. The US FTC's endorsement guidance — general advice, nothing to do with HN — makes the reason concrete: “Listing your employer on your profile page isn't enough. After all, people who just read what you post won't get that information.” Half a sentence removes the only reason anyone has to flag you.

“Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.” A second account used to say nice things about your first is not a growth tactic here; it is the thing that ends the account. The corollary is that a real posting history is an asset, and the difference is visible on a profile page in four seconds.

HN's guidelines are unambiguous: “Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.” That is a real constraint on how any monitoring or reply tool can be used here, and pretending otherwise would not survive contact with the audience. The workable arrangement is that software finds the thread and you write the comment.

The queries that find an old HN thread are rarely the story's title. They are the specific things said in the comments — the error message, the workaround, the “we tried X and moved to Y because” sentence somebody wrote at 2am. A comment that names a tool, states a limitation and gives a number is the one that gets found, which is the same discipline the live thread rewards. Write the specific version and the search benefit arrives as a by-product rather than a second job.

Answer engines lean heavily on community discussion, because it is where practitioners compare real tools. Be careful with the evidence, though: the published citation-share measurements cover Reddit in detail, and nobody publishes a comparable figure for Hacker News. Borrowing Reddit's number and putting an HN label on it would be inventing a statistic.

What can be said honestly is structural. HN threads are text-dense, crawlable, permanently addressable and full of specific technical claims attributed to named accounts — the properties that make a passage quotable. So write so a single paragraph survives being lifted out of context: conclusion first, evidence in the same comment. The register HN demands is also the register that ranks and gets quoted, which is why the constraint everybody complains about is what makes the channel durable.