Ask HN: Why do my posts sometimes become popular and sometimes invisible?

3 FerkiHN 4 7/9/2025, 5:39:31 PM

I have an account that is 67 days old and has 23 karma, but recently my posts have become invisible, no one sees them and all that, although 1 day ago everything was fine and the posts flew by 34 points.

Please advise what to do (if anyone sees this post), and tell me if this has happened to you?

Comments (4)

PaulHoule · 20h ago

I post a lot, most of the posts get a few votes

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=PaulHoule

maybe 1 in 30 hits it big. Two days ago this got 562 points

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44489690

I don't know if any explanation is necessary other than "this is the case". I know my statistics are not that different from the average post. If the same article is submitted 20 times you might find it sometimes gets 0 votes and sometimes gets 115. I know some strategies that could get my average vote count much higher but if I did you would see 5 posts from me on the front page at once and I don't like the optics of that.

FerkiHN · 19h ago

Thanks, I realized it was completely random, so I just need to post and it will all work out sooner or later, right?

PaulHoule · 19h ago

Somewhat random but if you post things people find interesting you'll get better results.

If you look at your profile and turn on "showdead" you will get some more insights. It is a classic mistake that people post articles from their blog and nothing but articles from their blog and everything they post winds up [dead].

It is fine to post articles from your blog so long as you also post articles from other sites but a lot of people never figure that out.

pvg · 20h ago

You should mail questions like this to the moderators at hn@ycombinator.com