For one popular project of mine that hit the front page I had a 2% sign-up rate. It was a free service that used GitHub for authentication, which likely helped.

I had a Netlify landing page (CDN), and the web app was a Django app on a single DigitalOcean droplet. I didn't see any complaints of performance issues / resource usage stayed low.

Previously:

The Value of Hitting the HN Front Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44584461 - July 2025 (6 comments)

I once got a job from a post on my blog that hit the front page. So the value to me was enormous.

An open source project I was working on was on the front page for about 2 days:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44292103

And heres the analytics from that time:

https://imgur.com/XGsiot4

I don't reallly bother tracking sign ups as its a totally free app, but from then to now, it looks like i've picked up about 1600 new accounts.

People fiddle with SEO with a lot of effort and some mixed success. While it takes a single solid hit at the HN (or Reddit) to get on the top.

Of course, it means that a post needs to have more than suitable keywords. So, I never sacrifice the quality of a post just too boost its SEO.

Agree with the gist of 1. & 2. but was hoping for a more analytic-scientific approach to measuring the impact of the HN Front Page. That is probably impossible though. If you invent github/sliced bread then hitting the front page might be the best thing to happen to your idea. If your profitable business of scamming grannies gets the same exposure it will probably be removed from the iOS/Android App Stores within minutes. Launching Dropbox here is likely somewhere in the middle.

Not sure if "have a CDN" advice is as sure as is claimed. My projects site has been #1 on the front page many times, and my dinky little $3/mo VPS had no issues at all in any of those cases.

I made a map of all the request last time I hit the front page. Timestamp 1:40 in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzpU8-jCV7k&t=100s

This post is pretty meta now that it's on the front page. A nice follow-up post would be:

The Value of 'The Value of Hitting the HN Front Page' Hitting the HN Front Page

I guess the value would be people might be more likely to prepare with CDNs or engage with comments etc. I wonder if that's measurable.

A year or so ago, I posted a link that you can help Anna's Archive by seeding their torrents [0]. I monitored (eye-balled) their stats [1] to see whether there was a bump in seeding afterwards, and couldn't see one. So, the "low conversion" comment might be true.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40672215

[1] https://annas-archive.org/torrents

Yet another "Hitting HN = 30k visits" breakdown from a friend of mine (in 2022): https://www.reproof.app/blog/the-hacker-news-effect

I have made the front page a few times, and I loved it. The discussion is so good, not to mention the random emails and LinkedIn connections. It's very validating when the topic would be too niche for other communities.

Having a high-visibility post on Reddit meant a stressful few hours and some of the most toxic interactions I've experienced.

I hit the front page of HN about two years ago with https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf , and I concur with this list. Among other things it taught me the invaluable lesson that only a surprise $100 bill from my (excellent!) hosting provider could have that I really should optimize my GIFs and cache them before that happens.

As my father always says, experience is cheap at any cost!

My blog post reached #1 on HN two years ago. The 1000+ comments were extremely interesting and encouraging. I learned a lot and engaged in highly insightful discussions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402

I can attest to the follow-on traffic. I had a showHN on the front page for a brief moment. A few weeks later it was featured in a popular Chinese newsletter. There's also been a few smaller spikes that is attributable to HN.

A post went viral here for a culture magazine I work for. It led to the writer getting employee of the month at a big all hands meeting, along with our host shutting down our Google indexing thinking that we were under attack.

It's nice to see HN relatively safe from the likes of r/gamedev ChatGPT-generated "postmortem post" spray-and-pray marketing.

Embarrassingly, I used to submit my own website’s article. A few of them have hit the front-page of Hacker News. I remember, once submitting it and waiting for it to hit, when it did, I recorded a video of the first few minutes. Then I went to sleep.

https://brajeshwar.com/2011/how-is-it-like-during-the-first-...

Now, I consider my site as something rather personal, bland, just my babbles, and kinda s**t compared to many of the ones that pops up on Hacker News.

A few years ago, on my birthday, I quickly checked the visitor stats for a little side project I had started (r-exercises.com). Instead of the usual 2 or 3 live visitors, there were hundreds. It looked odd to me—more like a glitch—so I quickly returned to the party, serving food and drinks to my guests.

Later, while cleaning up after the party, I remembered the unusual spike in visitors and decided to check again. To my surprise, there were still hundreds of live visitors. The total visitor count for the day was around 10,000. After tracking down the source, I discovered that a really kind person had shared the directory/landing page I had created just a few days earlier—right here on Hacker News. It had made it to the front page, with around 200 upvotes and 40 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12153811

For me, the value of hitting the HN front page was twofold. First, it felt like validation for my little side project, and it encouraged me to take it more seriously (despite having a busy daily schedule as a freelance data scientist). But perhaps more importantly, it broadened my horizons and introduced me to a whole new world of information, ideas, and discussions here on HN.

Thank you HN for this wonderful birthday gift!

I'm still happy that a few of my blog posts have hit the frontpage here. Two were rants about fake agile[1] and standups[2], which helped me feel not so unhappily alone at the state of the industry. There were others too, such as my post on why I think browser push notifications are terrible, another one was a stupid kludge to fix Cloudflare breaking my SVGs.

There is also another one about dark/light modes that made it to frontpage but got some pretty nasty comments which surprised me, especially from one person in particular who seemed to make it their mission to write absurd comment after absurd comment ironically acting like exactly the kind of person I described in my blog post.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31074861

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40557347

It's always a pretty scary few minutes suddenly seeing a traffic spike, my usual thought is "oh no today isn't going to be good", which is mostly a thought process I have thanks to Reddit being incredibly toxic and unpleasant almost 100% of the time. Any time my blog posts have made it there I dread taking a look at the comments.

I’ve had a couple of things make the FP. One was #1 for a while.

I submitted them both, but I don’t usually submit stuff, and most of my submissions are one-pointers. These were tutorials or side projects that I thought might be useful to folks. I guess some people agreed.

Most of my karma is comments. There’s really almost no value for me, in limelight. My work is usually “below the radar,” so to speak, and I’m retired. I’m not looking for work or notoriety. I actually kind of like hanging around the joint. I spent most of my career, being the dumbest guy in the room, and that’s sort of what I get, here.

OP, a friendly heads up: I'm stuck in a recaptcha loop when trying to visit your site on Chrome, Safari, and firefox.

I think I've been on the HN front page something like 30 times now since August 2021, with maybe half of those hitting it out of the park and lingering for over a day.

There are real diminishing returns in terms of follow-up traffic and follow-up effects. As to be expected, but it's worth keeping in mind that this is something that generally happens over time as the novelty of whatever you're writing about wears off. The good part is that as part of this you'll gradually get more regular readers, so there's less pronounced feast-or-famine cycles.

(Here I don't measure visits as there's so much bot traffic noise especially on anything that hits HN, but mostly focus on whether I get actual engagement, if people reach out to me, send me emails and so on)

I think ultimately a blog post isn't interesting because it's on HN, it's on HN because it's interesting.

Tryharding with regards to the HN frontpage is more likely to come at a cost of writing quality, and thus reducing the likelihood of making the front page.

Having made the front page more a few times, the value is really minimal. Yes, I've made sales from HN traffic, but not that much in the grand scheme of things.

But the value from all the links SEO wise was more valuable. If you make the front page normally people are going to post you in other places, translate it, or something else, which increases your SEO.

The hug of death isn't that large. I had a 5 euro DigitalOcean droplet running Nuxt, which handled 30k visitors in a single day without CloudFlare caching it. So if you have a decent setup you should be good.