###What I Learned from Being on the Front Page
March 2014
Recently one of my blog posts made it to the front page of Hacker News. Being on the front page taught me things I wish I had known long before. I thought it might help some of you, especially those who like to write from time to time. Here is what I learned.
Audience
Having an audience almost always matters. If you are writing, it is important to have an audience. Audience keeps you in shape.
Hacker News is a community where readers are mainly from tech world. If you submit an article that readers find interesting, you will get upvotes. If not, your submission will get unnoticed. If you get enough upvotes, you will be on the front page where thousands of people will see your submission. [1] How long you will stay on the front page is determined by readers. [2]
Comments
Time is the best thing a reader can offer you, among all other things. Readers simply use their valuable time to read what you wrote. So, whatever you write, it must be worth your readers' time. Some readers, however, go beyond reading and help you improve your work by taking the time to make comments. Thanks to this, I met with several amazing people. That being said, one of the commenters on Hacker News, took the time to fork my writing and proposed some changes for it. [3] This was something I was not expecting. I also find interesting to see that sometimes there may be completely different angles. Here's a comment thread about one of my posts.
— This is the saddest thing I've ever read. (moeedm)
— On the other hand this is one of the best things I've ever read. (Marwy)
I don't judge comments as being positive or negative. [4] I consider them as being helpful or not. The great thing about comments is, you have the opportunity to have a different angle—if you know how to listen. I have benefited from all the comments, as long as they are constructive.
Side effects
Being on the spotlight has some side effects. In my case — up to this point — they were all positive. I got precious feedback on different channels. Twitter was the most direct one to engage with readers. Tumblr also helped a lot, since readers could easily share. At some point, I got promoted on Pocket, which also brought several new readers. Thanks to these side effects, I met with new people, and learned a lot about their work. [5]
Technical aspects
Technically speaking, readers use different technologies to access your content. That being said, your understanding of your content and your readers' might be completely different. [6]
The best part of having many readers is, you learn a lot in the process. One thing I noticed was, the pages were taking too long to load, however I was able to reduce page load time by 600% to around 2 seconds. [7] Analyzing the technology used by different visitors, helped me further pinpoint a few issues I didn't know existed. [8]
Bias
There is a bias here. I am telling this story based on my experience. My being on the front page doesn't necessarily mean that I wrote a great post. This is just a postmortem. I am just telling this story because I wish I had known things before I made to the front page. I am sure that I lost several readers just because the reading experience sucked. I am sorry for that.
Conclusion
I learned a lot from being on the front page of Hacker News. All from the readers, directly or indirectly. I also got thousands of visitors and hundreds of regular readers, which I believe is the best thing a writer could ask for.
If you share one of your writings and could not get readers, don't just give up. There are stories to be told. Some could go unnoticed. Alas there is no framework to fix that. If you believe that you have a story to be told. Just keep writing. This is what I wish I had known before making to the front page.
Writing with an audience in mind, changes everything. It helps you to form and improve your thinking. Your audience determines how you convey your ideas. But, how will you know your audience if you don't ever meet them? I have no way of knowing this. I do know one thing though, writing is the greatest invention in the history. You may well be read in a year, or in a hundread years.
Writing is fair. You have readers. If they like what you write, you will exist. If they don't, you won't. If you put your work out, some people would criticize you but some of them would go out of their way to help you. This will make your work better.
This is why having an audience almost always matters.
Notes
[1] There is actually no guarantee here. It was what I experienced.
[2] There are other factors, the base algorithm is shared by Paul Graham.
[3] I draft my writings on GitHub and you may easily suggest styling or fix errata by just forking my repository.
[4] There are also mean comments, which is widely discussed on Hacker News. I am not talking about the negative comments. Negative comments can be very empowering in the sense that they would attack the weakest parts in your writing. However, this is not the case. This also does not necessarily mean that my writings are very good and negative comments are due to this detorioration. Nevertheless, I find some of the comments very rude.
[5] There were readers I wish I could connect, or at least get back. But due to lack of information, I could not.
[6] This is serious. In technical terms what you experience may not be what your readers experience due to different resolutions and technologies your readers use.
[7] I used GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights to optimize the requests and reduce the page load time. I was able to reduce the page size around 400 KB and HTTP requests to around 40. This made a huge impact on the reading experience.
[8] Analyzing user behaviors made me aware of different devices and screen sizes. This may seem no brainer but if you don't know where to look, it is hard to notice you have an issue. This helped me realize many readers use tablets and when they read it in vertical mode the reading suffered. I wasn't aware of it, but I fixed it now.
Thanks to Şirin Uzun Ulutaş, Mehmet Kordacı, Yuval Shoshan, Ergin Nalçacı and Sarp Centel for reading drafts of this.