It's unusual for me to try to "time" my submissions to Hacker News. When I published this post, I thought it would be interesting to live tweet my publication day process,[0] so I published sooner than I originally planned because it was a slow news day on HN. But it ended up not gaining traction on HN that day anyway, so even that optimization seemed to have no effect.
But overall, I think the HN filter works pretty well. I can't think of anything I do to get an edge aside from investing a lot more time into editing and illustrations than I think most bloggers do, but that would be the filter working as intended.
I do worry about taking scores and readership metrics too personally. When I published my first code review article back in 2017,[1] it flopped on Hacker News and on reddit, the two places I was hoping it would find readers. I felt awful because I spent more time on it than I'd ever spent on a blog post before.
I took a break from watching the metrics and went for a run, and that cleared my head. I decided that I felt good about the post regardless of what response it got, and I need to have that attitude on future posts. When I got back from my run, it had taken off on reddit, which made me excited but also kind of interfered with the lesson I was hoping to learn. But I do try to view my articles mainly in terms of how good I feel about them and maybe 20% what kind of response they get.
It's unusual for me to try to "time" my submissions to Hacker News. When I published this post, I thought it would be interesting to live tweet my publication day process,[0] so I published sooner than I originally planned because it was a slow news day on HN. But it ended up not gaining traction on HN that day anyway, so even that optimization seemed to have no effect.
But overall, I think the HN filter works pretty well. I can't think of anything I do to get an edge aside from investing a lot more time into editing and illustrations than I think most bloggers do, but that would be the filter working as intended.
I do worry about taking scores and readership metrics too personally. When I published my first code review article back in 2017,[1] it flopped on Hacker News and on reddit, the two places I was hoping it would find readers. I felt awful because I spent more time on it than I'd ever spent on a blog post before.
I took a break from watching the metrics and went for a run, and that cleared my head. I decided that I felt good about the post regardless of what response it got, and I need to have that attitude on future posts. When I got back from my run, it had taken off on reddit, which made me excited but also kind of interfered with the lesson I was hoping to learn. But I do try to view my articles mainly in terms of how good I feel about them and maybe 20% what kind of response they get.
[0] https://twitter.com/deliberatecoder/status/13341560121321185...
[1] https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-1/