This is true - when I post articles on HN I usually get between 5 and 30 click throughs, and it also does wonders for the speed of Google indexing.
Having said that, I ensure submitted articles remain relevant and of interest to the community. We're releasing three new articles this week - I'll certainly put one up here, but the other two are less relevant. They might garner traffic to my site, but I don't want noise on HN so why create it myself?
Absolutely true about posting only relevant articles. I try to keep even my comments to myself unless they actually add to the discussion in some way here on HN. Each post I made recently I felt was actually relevant, I wouldn't post anything I didn't think was interesting.
The google indexing is absolutely true. I've tried to time it, usually it takes only about 45 minutes from the moment it gets posted to being indexed. You can see how long it took by searching in google for the hn submission and then check to see how long ago it was spidered, versus how long ago it was posted.
The google bot must re-visit hn very frequently, 10's of times per day for the 'news' and 'newest' page.
Good one. I don't know the exact implications of nofollow, but I think it might be that if google considers the destination to be legit that it will add the url to its crawl queue without giving it any 'pagerank juice'.
Only a googler could tell you for sure though.
I've seen google ferret out results that were never linked through the toolbar or some other mechanism outside of the regular crawl process. (in that one case the toolbar was my only possible explanation, or it was through analytics).
And I guess there's always google juice to consider - may be more relevant to pages about Hackers, but if it's being indexed that often than all the sites HN links to must benefit from association.
(I think this comment really shows my SEO naivety, but I hope you get the gist.)
I think the HN homepage pagerank is diluted too much to make much of a difference, first of all there are 30 other outgoing links, and besides that they change all the time.
Google 'juice' is most likely best collected by having links on authoritative pages that will keep the link visible on the same page for a long time, and that have relatively few outgoing links.
What surprises me is how often old HN comments keep sending visitors. I made a comment about my JS/Canvas games 19 days ago ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281730 ) and I still get 5-10 clicks a day from it. It's pretty surprising actually. Reddit has a similar effect.
Same with upvotes. I'll post a response, get a few upvotes, post nothing for a few days, and usually get an upvote after the article is long off the front page. Guess people are a lot more backlogged than me! :)
I very often get backlogged, but still try to keep up. I submit comments as distant as 2 days beyond the original submission date. I vote no matter the age of a submission or comment; if something is worth reading, age almost doesn't matter (excepting newsworthiness, etc.). I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that browses HN with a little delay.
The reason for this is that if the HN thread has a keyword rich title it shows up in Google search results, which in turn passes visitors on to your site.
I've long been suspecting that there is something weird going on at reddit. Frequently we'll post something and see it get nuked. Then a few days later one of a few familiar names posts it and suddenly it does very well, usually with a pass through another blog as opposed to a direct link.
I wonder if that entire system is silently rigged to control traffic.
No need for rigging the system, few simple rules and many individual actions can produce complex behaviors.
New queue on reddit moves very fast - currently the oldest item is just about 7 minutes old. It's very easy to go unnoticed by target audience (people who would upvote the submission) in such short time window.
Multiple submissions mean post has higher chance to get noticed.
Eventual downvotes come from people who want to decrease competition for their own submissions, giving them extra few minutes in new queue.
Also people may check submission queues of familiar users because they like their submissions, thus increasing chances of such submissions being noticed.
Similar thing already started to happen here on HN. Even with new queue being much longer (at about 1 hour) there are multiplicities.
Many times the same post (though not necessarily the same url) gets submitted multiple times and only later submissions get promoted to the frontpage.
Well, sometimes it even happens that in a span of few hours/days the same story appears on frontpage several times, with completely disjoint set of commenters not being aware of earlier discussions.
If your posts stay at 1 upvote then you've probably been blocked by the spam filter. If that is the case you just need to PM a moderator to take a look at the post and then will unblock it. It won't help for that posts, but the spam filter should learn from it and not block your future posts.
This isn't just a sample size of KirinDave, this is a common theme for many people I know. If we are all caught by a spam filter, then Reddit is doing something very wrong.
Reddit's spam filter is completely and totally broken (or at least was about a month ago). The moderators effectively get to pick and choose what stories even hit the queue. I had a user there (same handle as here) that had something like 3000 link karma and something in the tens of thousands of comment karma.
Every story I posted would get flagged as "spam", meaning I had to message a moderator. Typically, the responses I would get would be things like "sorry, I don't really like the article. Post it somewhere else.".
Granted, these were typically opinion articles that I had written, so I could understand where they were coming from to a small degree. The problem with this was that the ones that did get accepted usually made the front page.
Don't get me wrong, I still use reddit to a degree, but it isn't really a technology site anymore. People will say things like "subscribe to better subreddits!", and I do, but none of them really see much traffic. A lot of times, I'll load the page and it will say "there is nothing here". The pics section has some funny things (although the majority of them seem to be tagged with 4gifs.com, which I assume means they all came from 4chan), and so does the "ask" section. There is still some entertainment value to the site, but it isn't really a list of democratically chosen articles anymore.
There's also different metrics on what constitutes a net-win, that may come out differently for different kinds of traffic sources. For example, is the primary reason you want traffic (a) some sort of influence; or (b) ad revenue; or (c) signups for a service?
Exactly. The sort of writers who are excited by thirty clicks are probably interested in influence. For them, measuring RSS subscriptions, comments, or inbound links is better.
I'm not actually sure what I'm looking for, it wasn't necessarily traffic. I wouldn't expect HN to lead to signups on my site and I don't actually monetize my blog at all. However I have gotten something great already; I got a comment to correct my spelling or grammar, I don't know which but I appreciated it.
True, but every reader must have clicked through at some point. If you're using analytics you can narrow this down quite a bit, and if you get consistent nuisance from a certain source you could even decide to blacklist that source.
I've done that with a few sites that would be a great source of trolls and griefers.
The thing with Reddit is that it seems biased against new users and accusations of linkspam are far too prevalent. Sites like Reddit are going to have to learn, eventually, that the nature of sharing content on the Web has changed and self-promotion isn't a bad thing. If it were, Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter accounts wouldn't exist.
In terms of submitting stuff and actually getting traffic from it, I'd recommend 2leep ( http://2leep.com/ – disclosure: I helped with the site's layout, but I did it for free because I liked the idea and thought it deserved more attention), which at the very least is a consistent stream of traffic and gets your page in front of a lot of eyeballs.
I think that one shouldn't put all their eggs in traffic. Traffic is nice. If you have a good idea and good content, people will notice. I have a steady freelance writing gig from my work on http://shortformblog.com/, along with fairly regular mentions on The Atlantic's Web site and lots of awesomely random notices.
It's not major startup fund capital or anything, but I'll take it because it's exposure. And that exposure pays more than ads do when you're starting small.
My point? Do cool stuff and you don't need upvotes.
I actually sort of like Reddit's model on those two points. Essentially, that you should: 1) lurk initially, not submitting links until you understand the community and its culture; and 2) primarily submit links you think people will find interesting, not your own links that you're trying to promote (or at least, actively identify when it's your own link, e.g. "hey reddit, I made an X").
Not every site has to be like that, but it seems fine for some sites to be that way. The fact that Facebook fan pages exist is different from saying that everything on the web has to go in similar directions.
I guess, to me, there's a difference between what you're saying and vigilantes calling you out because they think you're a link spammer. To a degree, it discourages growth in the community because it scares people off.
And it does feel, to a degree, double-standardish. For example, the dude from The Oatmeal submits tons of his own links but seemingly nobody bats an eye.
The only comment on the HN submission is 'is your site down?', that can't be good news. Maybe it was unreachable for a bit right after posting, that's a surefire way to scroll of the new page without upvotes, which will effectively kill your post.
I actually cleared that up with the commenter directly but thanks for checking in. I saw that comment and was worried it was down too and had to check everything out immediately.
Having said that, I ensure submitted articles remain relevant and of interest to the community. We're releasing three new articles this week - I'll certainly put one up here, but the other two are less relevant. They might garner traffic to my site, but I don't want noise on HN so why create it myself?