Thanks for doing this for all of us who make things. Indifference towards people's side projects and new startup ideas has been creeping into the HN community for the past couple of years and I find it discouraging. Personally, I'd rather read about people's Show HN posts than the latest mainstream news stories that I could find anywhere.
HN Showcase highlights the problem: Hardly any of the Show HN posts get voted on anymore. I think we've become more a community of critics than makers. I haven't even thought about posting Show HN's for my last couple of projects (and my current startup), where 5 years ago that would have been the first thing I did! A cool hack is worth sharing, even if it's not perfect.
EDIT: Actually, if you feel like me and have held back, why not use the comments section of this post to "Show HN" your project. At least in here you'll know everyone cares about side projects and maybe we can all endeavor to give you constructive feedback :)
My favorite part of Hacker News is Show HN. When I see all the awesome projects and startups people are building, I get inspired to work on my own projects.
I launched r/SideProject because there are a lot of great projects and startups that do not get any exposure. It is a subreddit for sharing and receiving constructive feedback on side projects and startups.
Sometimes getting voted on is not enough. Posted a Show HN for BitBalloon yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6285205). Got up-votes enough to go on the front-page, but a few minutes after it hit front-page, it suddenly got booted way down to page 3, and that was the end of it.
Still got some more votes, but nothing could bring it up above #50.
Your submission was probably flagged, possibly by multiple people.
An HN pet peeve of mine is that flagging does not require even a modicum of rationale. I can flag any submission without even the slightest justification. When my own submissions have been flagged, I've also been left wondering "Why?" I understand why many of my submissions have not been upvoted. Many are simply not of upvote-quality. But not upvoting is quite different from flagging.
You may be interested in the HN Slapdown user script [1] which provides insight into articles' scores versus their rank order. With this installed, I tend to look especially at those with red scores because I am interested in counteracting what I believe to be an overzealous application of flagging.
Even right now, this very article has a yellow score indicating that it may be flagged (or something else is affecting its rank order versus its point score).
I personally have only ever flagged one or two articles, and only when I felt that the subject matter had utterly nothing to do with my understanding of the purpose of this site. When I did so, I was shocked at the magnitude of the penalty: if I recall correctly, the article I flagged was instantly dropped from the front page to the third page. It really gave me appreciation for how sparingly one should apply flags.
When I don't find a submission interesting, I just don't upvote it.
So, Tara from YC told me that the problem was that the post set off the voting ring detector.
We don't have anything like a voting ring, but we obviously did tell people about launching BitBalloon in a Show HN. Seems we shouldn't have done that.
This might be a reason ShowHN posts seem to be penalized in general, I imagine it's the norm to tell your friends when you launch a whole new product...
Problems may arise when you send out a direct link to an article. When friends go directly to that article from the URL you provided, that could possible be setting off triggers. Better to just have people search for the post string or just direct to the "New" submissions and scroll down to article. This is only my suspicion, but it seems to be the case based on observations with submission behavior and article ranking.
And I think your idea is even better than what I did!
Medium is nice, but it might be overkill for this - I've just written a self post on HN for this purpose, I'll post it up around 1am PST tonight (don't want to post the same thing twice in a day).
I think it should be like the whoishiring bot, only once a week rather than once a month.
Other thoughts:
- everyone who posts there agrees to comment/give feedback on 5+ other posts
- everyone who posts something must include a backstory to their project (why did they want to build it)
If you have also tried to get feedback on your personal projects on HN without much luck and want to put some input into what this weekly post might look like, feel free to shoot me an email (cjbarber@stanford.edu)
[Also, I realize a bunch of people on HN have tried to do this. Hn for ideas, a bunch of different sites for posting your product betas, etc, not sure what the right solution is but with some collaboration we might be able to tease it out!]
HN Showcase highlights the problem: Hardly any of the Show HN posts get voted on anymore. I think we've become more a community of critics than makers. I haven't even thought about posting Show HN's for my last couple of projects (and my current startup), where 5 years ago that would have been the first thing I did! A cool hack is worth sharing, even if it's not perfect.
EDIT: Actually, if you feel like me and have held back, why not use the comments section of this post to "Show HN" your project. At least in here you'll know everyone cares about side projects and maybe we can all endeavor to give you constructive feedback :)