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Comment by troydavis | Hacker News Reader

How many times is it reasonable to submit the same URL to HN?

This link is to https://github.com/spolu/warp?attempt=8. If one needs to add an "attempt" HTTP parameter to track submissions of the same URL, and this is the 8th attempt, that seems like way too many.

Here's a few prior identical submissions by the same person:

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14398392 (ie, https://github.com/spolu/warp?attempt=1)

4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14407813

6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452505

If 8 isn't too many, what is? 20? Submit the same link every day indefinitely until it reaches the front page?

View on HN

If something had enough inherent interestingness to end up at the #1 position (as this submission is right now), then I'd argue that its taking a number of attempts to do so is an indictment of the ranking algorithm for burying it before, rather than an indictment of the author for persisting.

Certainly, if someone persists in trying and the thing just never gets popular, that's just spam. But if "the right timing" was all that was needed to cause the sumission to hit #1? Maybe "the right timing" needs to be a concept built into the submission queue.

It's an interesting question. I could see it being a mix of that and a poor-quality ranking algorithm, so that it's too easy for articles to end up buried.

Most examples of this are one person submitting daily articles from their own site or sites they're paid to market. Sometimes even those end up near the top of the front page, and often when that happens, if one looks at prior submissions from that same person and site, the article that made the front page seems like it would do worse than prior articles.

I could see all of this as an indicator that the ranking/voting doesn't do a great job of letting interesting stuff get a shot, nor of penalizing folks who constantly submit posts on their own site (for months - different than this situation). The "New" page is easy enough to ignore that I could imagine few visitors looking at it regularly, so the profile of visitors to that page is different than to the home page.

Thanks for pointing this out, I've been thinking about this very question myself. Perhaps Stan is trying to test out different titles, or felt that a different title does this project more justice as he is progressing with its development?

Different titles he used, in chronological order:

* Show HN: Warp – Simple terminal sharing for better developers interactions

* Warp – share your terminal with one simple command

* Show HN: Instantaneous terminal sharing Instantaneous terminal sharing

My take away from this: Don't include app/product name, describe product in as few words as possible, don't include examples (... for ...) so readers has the opportunity to imagine the possibilities.

I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion, given that HN is pretty specific about what title to use. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

Basically, the HN title should be the page title (with a few exceptions noted in the doc above). The whole point is not to use the title to do what you're proposing and apparently, observing.

My interest wasn't "How do I get something to rank on HN?", it was "I want to encourage people to submit things that they discover and love, not repeatedly submitting things they're affiliated with." I may be in the minority, though.

Thanks for clarifying.

Agreed with everything that was said here. I personally think it's better to post multiple times than to post with a vote ring. The latter is unfair to the community while the former is not annoying since they just come and go through new

Given that it is suddenly ranking high, I assume the ranking is arbitrary enough to warrant multiple attempts. Likewise, I'd like to see following topics of submissions so that I see this instead of many other, for me irrelevant, news and articles.

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