What happens when your blog post hits #1 in Hacker News?
Some weeks ago my post “How the AI bubble bursts” reached #1 in Hacker News and stayed there for about 3 hours, plus 1 hour on the front page until it ultimately dropped. This came as a total surprise, I expected to get 4 points, like my previous post.
It was certainly an emotional rollercoaster to get that validation from a community I’ve been following since I first got to the internet. It was also hard to not make this my whole personality. It’s crazy to think that, for 4 hours, my writing was the most-read thing in Silicon Valley1, that people I admire, from companies I admire, even maybe a billionaire, read my article and got an idea out of my post. It’s almost certain that at least someone from a major AI lab read it.
The aftermath
The post ended up with 372 upvotes and 532 comments, was opened by 16K people the day it was released, and very interestingly, by 4K more the rest of the week. My Cloudflare Pages setup for this blog was able to handle this without blinking, which was a huge relief. As soon as it got to the top, Google Analytics showed me 6K people online. Surreal.
Something I didn’t know is that after a post makes it to the homepage, Hacker News drops the nofollow tag, so Google is able to recognize it as a full link. The article also gets mentioned in the front page archive for that day. It was picked up by the Financial Times as a reading list for the day (also with a full link), and also linked in a dozen Hacker News aggregators. It got backlinks from other posts where they mentioned it, a bunch of shares on subreddits2. It got shared about a dozen times on Twitter and it was featured in an AI-generated podcast.
The backlinks gave a boost to the Google rankings, this blog was started just 3 months ago after all, but search traffic dropped back to baseline quite quickly. I thought it was going to push Google to index parts of my site that it was ignoring, but so far that didn’t happen.
Given the numbers, it yielded a remarkably low long-term engagement: only 12 people left their email to subscribe to the blog and I got a grand total of 2 new Twitter/X followers.
But some people reached out on LinkedIn, and even people I knew congratulated me on making it to the top without me telling them I was there, I didn’t really think that many people read HN daily. Some people told me they saw the post shared in group chats.
Most of the traffic came from the US, particularly San Francisco as you’d expect. Second came the UK, Germany and Canada. I think the Europe traffic is significant given that it was posted in a more East-Coast/Europe time-friendly (1pm CET). Even then, San Francisco did 3x more views than New York.
That day was a complete productivity write-off for me, I basically could not focus on anything else, I was hooked to the stats in disbelief. I waited for Friday to see if it would get featured in Hacker Newsletter, but unfortunately it didn’t make it.
This was also a great excuse to share my thoughts with people I admire, and the validation made it a lot easier than just selling them something I wrote over the weekend.
Why did my post get there?
After submitting my post with very little hope, it received 4 upvotes almost immediately. Exciting, but not crazy. But then I realized the upvotes came in so fast the algo must have caught that and made it to the front page. After reaching the front page, the same thing happened but this time with dozens of upvotes, shooting it to the very top. I attribute a fair amount of the success of the post to the fact that the people who were online as soon as I posted it upvoted it, no wonder people try to time this all the time.
When discussing why it reached the top, some people brought up the title was catchy. That was interesting because it was literally the first thing I thought of, and I started writing with that title as a north star. Next time I guess I’ll give it a little more thought.
Something that worked is that the article is contrarian enough that everyone, especially HN readers, has an opinion on. The comment section blew up. This was not really something I intended explicitly when writing, I wrote the post because I think it’s true, not to get more clicks or comments.
The post was written by me and then polished with the help of Claude Code (paradoxical, right?). I distilled the process into a skill I released.
The comments
Comments also started to come in, at the beginning I tried to be on top, but later I just gave up. They were just coming in so fast, and quite frankly many were dead ends, like people arguing over details and semantics, or clearly writing without having read the post. You may also think that if it got to the top so fast, at least someone would write that they liked it, but I think I only saw one such message.
Writing still matters
It’s curious that the article may have at most 2-3 novel ideas, the rest is a summary of the state for giving context. I wrote it because I was struggling to explain these ideas to people, so I wanted to have a shareable version and writing it down would help me think it through.
It surprised me how appreciated the article was. It made me realize that people really do appreciate articles that structure thoughts they see dispersed in social media. In a world of slop and clickbait, sitting down to organize and write down your thoughts is more valuable than ever, both for the author and the readers.
I could have posted this as a video and would probably have had better prospects of going viral or building a following, but that would require probably 4x the time, and that time would not be spent thinking about the problem I wanted to write (and think) about, but rather how I read aloud and how I look on camera.
I’m using the Network State definition by Balaji Srinivasan. Referring to a community of people that identify with SV, not necessarily people physically there. Probably in actual Silicon Valley whatever was on the front page of the New York Times had way more reads than my article. ↩
It’s interesting that Reddit has a completely different culture from Hacker News. Even though the post was shared by other people in many subreddits, when I submitted it to one myself it got deleted for self-promotion. ↩
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