As a weekend project, I analyzed Hacker News posts to figure out what does best. Here are some of the most interesting things I found, let me know if you'd like me to add any others!
The best time to post on HN:
- Sundays are the best day to post with posts created between 11am-12pm getting the highest average upvotes
There are ~80k posts every 4 months
- About 20k posts per month on HN
Best keywords to use in the title:
- Any mention of a tech company (google, apple, facebook, etc) or open source seems to do the best
Best performing url to link to:
- github.com (not surprising given the strength of open source mentioned above)
Posts with negative titles tend to do better than posts with positive ones
- Posts that have negative titles get ~4 more upvotes on average than those that are more positive
The humourist Alen Coren wrote a book called "Golfing for Cats" with a swastika on the cover on the basis that those three elements (cats, golf and Nazis) would make it a sure fire hit.
I think the best time to post is when you have something worth posting - unless you are involved in SEO.
As a weekend project, I analyzed Hacker News posts to figure out what does best. Here are some of the most interesting things I found, let me know if you'd like me to add any others!
The best time to post on HN: - Sundays are the best day to post with posts created between 11am-12pm getting the highest average upvotes
Most popular post of all time: - Stephen Hawking has died (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43396008)
There are ~80k posts every 4 months - About 20k posts per month on HN
Best keywords to use in the title: - Any mention of a tech company (google, apple, facebook, etc) or open source seems to do the best
Best performing url to link to: - github.com (not surprising given the strength of open source mentioned above)
Posts with negative titles tend to do better than posts with positive ones - Posts that have negative titles get ~4 more upvotes on average than those that are more positive
The dataset I used for the analysis was: https://huggingface.co/datasets/julien040/hacker-news-posts. Would love to hear what you think and if there's anything else you'd like me to add!