When your post hits #1 on Hacker News
A behind-the-scenes look at my initial reaction 😬, all the stats, cross-posting to Medium, and lessons learned
Two months ago, on August 18, a friend texted me, “Hey you’re on the top of HN!” “Oh no,” I responded, as I quickly made my way over to Hacker News to check out what was going on.
My recent post, Ask vs Guess Culture, had been blessed with the magically mysterious combination of timing, topic, and upvote velocity to rise to the top of the homepage. It stayed in the coveted #1 spot of Hacker News for the best part of the day.
It reached a shocking 946 points and 479 comments. By contrast, usually #1 posts have just 100-200 points.
While many individuals and startup founders would be thrilled with this achievement, my feelings were more mixed, as my relationship with Hacker News is, well, complicated.
My Relationship with Hacker News
My initial reaction to the news was one of excitement and dread, perhaps best represented by my favorite grimacing emoji 😬.
I’m not a stranger to the Hacker News front page.
I’ve been publishing online ever since I started working in startups in 2010, and my first post to get that #1 post badge was Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (HN), written in response to Amy Chua’s controversial Why Chinese Mothers are Superior, a post advocating for extreme tiger-parenting.
Subsequently, as I wrote about my experience in startups, many of my posts garnered 100+ upvotes on HN, including the following, all published in 2011. Naively, I migrated my domain to Medium when while I was employed there and did not fix all the re-directs, but I dug up the archived posts:
Hacker News brings a lot of eyeballs to my writing, and often the comments are reasonable and relatable. And also quite predictably, there are comments of the “Isn’t this just… <related idea>?” sort, or “How come this author only writes about her gender and isn’t very technical.” Others criticize or make assumptions about my background.
The pseudo-anonymity of Hacker News and Reddit usernames makes people behave quite differently than if they were speaking directly to your face. I learned to toughen up and gloss over these comments, but they did wear on me, and I also learned to treat Hacker News fame with caution.
Back in 2011, I had honed a clear sense of what would “make it” on Hacker News, and I wrote post after post that made it. I found an adrenaline rush in publishing and seeing a post climb the front page.
But that extrinsic motivation started to wear on me, and my online writing petered out for years.
When I resumed writing regularly, I vowed to write what I wanted to write, rather through the lens of what people on Hacker News want to read. I shared more about my relationship with writing in one of my earlier substack posts.
Nevertheless, here we are, with my Ask vs Guess Culture piece with almost 1000 upvotes on Hacker News, so I figured we’d take a look at the raw stats and the effects on my substack newsletter.
The Stats
So, what does getting the #1 spot on Hacker News do for your traffic?
+82k views (my average posts get around 10k)
+334 subscribers (I believe this is an underestimate via tracking, and the actual number is closer to 600, based on the graph below — I had ~15,900 subscribers when the post hit the HN homepage, and ~16,500 a week or so later)
+3 paid subscriptions
After the immediate traffic spike, it was also interesting to hear about how the post made its rounds.
A close friend texted me to share that it had been posted to the Zoom chat in an all-hands meeting for a women’s leadership group she’s in. A former co-worker shared that it had popped in an curation group for editors. Someone else texted me to let me know that their manager had sent them the post.
Some places it emerged were fairly predictable, with the post making its rounds on all the popular engineering leadership newsletters. Others, as a friend brought to my attention, were less expected, including a polyamory subreddit post.
Cross-Posting to Medium
Shortly after my post was on HN, Medium’s CEO Tony Stubblebine reached out to me to see if I wanted to post it to Medium. I know Tony from early Medium days when we co-worked from the Obvious Corporation office.
I re-posted it to Medium behind the paywall (why not!), and set the canonical URL to my existing post for SEO clarity.
Over the next few days, Ask vs Guess Culture was boosted, giving it a distribution bump. It was also selected for Staff Picks, an exclusive list of ~400 stories that put my post in the right sidebar of every Medium user’s home page.
What did these Medium stats look like?
$862 in Partner Program earnings
~12k viewers (this was a members-only post), with a 50% read ratio
6.3k “claps,” and a whopping 119 responses, almost all of which were thoughtful
Notably, the quality of Medium responses was vastly different from HN comments, and the audience seemed to be much more mainstream and not my usual engineering/tech readers. It was quite a refreshing change from the backseat criticism ripe in HN comments.
Lessons learned
Hit pieces are hard to follow up
I’ve found myself in a bit of a writing slump ever since Ask vs Guess Culture took off. My usual relaxed approach to writing of just publishing something feels harder. I have more subconscious expectations that what I write has to live up to the same standard.
I’ve also noticed a sense of scarcity in myself — was this my big writing break? Should I continue to write about ask vs guess culture? Is this how people get book deals? What if I miss this big opportunity by moving onto other topics? I need to remind myself that there are plenty of topics, and this is just one.
My writing isn’t just for engineers
I’ve long told myself this story that I’m a good writer — for an engineer. And so, whenever I veer into other topics, I sometimes feel like I need to bring it all back to engineering leadership lessons. Having this piece reach a more mainstream audience and seeing how my writing resonates with non-engineers was very validating for me. It encourages me to continue to explore topics I’d like to write about, even if they’re less engineering-related.
Different platforms serve different needs
I hadn’t been posting my writing to Medium, but now I plan to. While my substack audience feels much more like my list and my audience, Medium feels like a welcoming bunch of people who stumble on my work in passing. It’s a different feel over there, and I can see benefits of both. The partner program cash doesn’t hurt either.
You can’t plan for a piece to go viral
I had no clue this piece would blow up as it did. I sat down to write one weekend as my bi-weekly substack practice, with no particular topic in mind, and my mind wandered into a re-exploration of ask vs. guess culture. I didn’t even re-post it to any social channels, and I stopped posting my own work to Hacker News years ago.
But the regular practice of writing and publishing increases the chances that something you write at some point will be picked up and shared around.
And in case you missed it, here’s Ask vs Guess Culture:
Ask vs guess culture
Have you had someone ask you for a favor that seemed unreasonable — a referral you didn’t want to make, a long-term stay at your place, a sizable cash loan? But because they asked, you felt obliged to seriously consider it, to try to meet their request, even if it put you in a space of discomfort? Maybe you carry out the favor, but it sours your relatio…
oh interesting! thanks for sharing
This was the first article I read on Tech and Tea and what made me a subscriber! It was so good. I felt like I understood myself, others, and life better as a result of reading it. That top spot was well deserved. Congrats!