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Comment by donebizkit | Hacker News Reader

I submitted my side project last Tuesday @6am and it drowned within 10 min. I found a better exposure when I submitted to ASK HN instead. It would be great if we get the same analysis on the "ask" page. Thanks mayank for sharing your work.

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Looking at the ask tab, this is actually somewhat of a loophole people are using inappropriately. Prime examples on the ask page right now that have absolutely no business being there:

Ask HN: Invest in Adam | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5688027

Show HN: Elevatr | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5690920

A beautiful self hosted alternative to Basecamp | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5687765

Ask HN: Why was the MeteorAtSO twitter account suspended? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5686579

A lot of these are actually Show HNs exploiting the longer lifetime of Ask HN posts. That said, I like Show HN projects. Having a separate tab for "Show HN" (similar to Ask) would be nice, giving those projects more exposure.

Are you sure you're not allowed to post Show HNs through the Ask HN form? I'm finishing up a project that I'd like to post as a Show HN, and I was actually just about to post an Ask HN to find out if I should post my Show HN as a link or an Ask HN (I feel like I'm in Inception - We need to go deeper!!!)

It seems to me that it has more to do with tradeoffs than an actual policy against it. Ask HNs are much less likely to be ignored outright, and they linger on the Ask HN page, which is great. However, they tend to drop off the front page much more quickly than a link submitted with a url and no text. I've never seen officially stated rules on how to submit Show HNs, so let me know if you've seen something different.

The ask section was probably not created to give people an additional opportunity to promote themselves extra hard, it was probably created for putting actual questions in front of the HN community. People who abuse this facility know this and do it anyway because they think their links are deserving of more visibility than those poor schmucks who just post a Show HN URL on /newest and watch it disappear with 0 upvotes within 30 minutes.

Posting an Ask HN to query whether you should do a Show HN strikes me as incredibly superfluous at best, and at worst it comes across as a pretty obvious scheme to post your link twice.

The answer to "should I post my project on Show HN" will always be "yes", so there is absolutely no legitimate need for an extra ask thread.

> It seems to me that it has more to do with tradeoffs than an actual policy against it.

At no point was I talking about policy. I was talking about decency, humility, fairness, and restraint.

> Posting an Ask HN to query whether you should do a Show HN strikes me as incredibly superfluous at best, and at worst it comes across as a pretty obvious scheme to post your link twice.

Easy tiger, I'm sure if I was looking to spam HN I would have figured out a way to worm a link into my last comment. Anyway, I assure you that's not the case. It's a perfectly legitimate question, given the debate you and I are engaged in right now, and the fact that there's almost no guidance on this from PG in any of the site docs.

Furthermore, the text form clearly isn't intended just for Ask HNs because it's not labeled as such, and because there are Tell HNs, Warn HNs, Ask PGs, Tell PGs, Dear HNs, I'm sure a few other variants I can't recall now, and posts with no labels, and tons of Show HNs that no one (except you) complains about. It's a reasonable question.

This is about people who like to post Ask items simply because they get more exposure (and I linked several examples above). I don't believe it takes guidance from the site owner to see why this practice is bad. It should be very clear to just about everyone that it's sneaky and does not enhance overall HN content quality. Not every example of sneaky, degrading behavior should need to be explicitly addressed in the FAQs.

As for the question if it's a good idea to Ask HN whether you should Show HN, I don't see any legitimate reason to do this. If your project is bad and unworthy (or just unlucky), it will get ignored and/or flagged. I know, because it happened to me, too. Several times, actually. It's a great signal to stop working on a project.

But chances are, your project is actually pretty nice and it will end up on the front page. There is absolutely, positively no need to ask whether you should show - other than to increase your visibility and circumvent the duplicate link mechanism.

> tons of Show HNs that no one (except you) complains about

I realize that in this, like in many other things, I might be utterly alone and that posting fake Ask HN items is actually considered a great hack to improve your exposure and everybody thinks it's just awesome.

That's OK. I'm just a random guy stating his opinions. I tried to explain why I think it's bad and why I think people who are doing that are abusing the system. While I would never personally upvote or engage with such an entry, it's totally possible that nobody else sees a problem here. In fact, I'm pretty sure pg and admins don't see a problem there, or measures would have been taken to prevent it. Nevertheless, I feel the need to say what I believe is right anyway.

It's up to you to decide whether I'm right or not.

I thought that the title of the post had to start with 'Ask HN:' for it to end up in the Ask section. One of the posts you linked is actually my project and I definitely had no intention of being sneaky. Nor was I trying to bypass any rules. I initially posted it with a "Show HN" title, but it was immediately marked as spam (for reasons that I still don't understand because I've never posted to HN before), so I deleted it and asked a friend to submit the project for me. Neither of us knew that leaving out the url automatically classifies a post as Ask HN. I've just looked at the submit form again, and I see where it's written, but it's not immediately obvious that that's what will happen.

It's impossible to know the intentions behind every single post, but together they're a trend and they do tell a story. What is unclear to me is why would anyone post their Show HN in that gray, de-emphasized text field where URLs are not even converted into links? Visitors have to actually copy and paste the URLs into their address bar. That makes absolutely no sense unless there is another advantage to be gained from submitting text posts (instead of URL posts).

Many of us don't have influential networks. We consider HN as the de facto community for hackers and entrepreneurs. Submitting a Show HN is not an exploit. It is a proud move to showcase ones hard work to a fellow audience. I personally think that the community is healthy enough to balance between all types of submissions: articles, Ask HNs and Show HNs in terms of both the people submitting and the people consuming and upvoting. What I agree with you is the need for a separate Shown HN tab similar to Ask HN. There are third party crawlers that do that but we spend all out time here; might as well have the "Show HN" tab here as well.

I absolutely agree with everything you just said. I'm curious, did you perceive my posts otherwise?

Nope. I think we are on the same page overall. I just wanted to reassure the new users on this thread that the general practice of submitting a "Show HN" under "Ask HN" is not considered as an exploit. Add to that your point that it should not be abused and I think we have a solid rule of thumb.

Is there a separate submit page for Ask HN? or do you just prefix your post with that title?

It's the same submit page, just leave 'url' blank and write your post content in the 'text' box. The title can be whatever you want, though the common prefixes are helpful.

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