I very rarely share my articles or posts in any social network or website, but for some reason I felt the need to see if I could get a few eye balls to my article “End of Social Media” from Hacker News. Here is the link to my Hacker News submission.

It was actually quite exciting to get so many readers to my article and so much discussion in the Hacker News submission.

After I submitted my article to Hacker News, I was walking my dog for a couple of hours in the forest, during which time I didn’t look at my phone or website statistics to see if anyone was reading my article after my submission.

Once I came back from the forest and looked at the Hacker News submission, I saw that it was trending in the front page and people were leaving comments to it.

I remember getting a little bit anxious, scared and excited at the same time while I realised that people were really reading my post.

All the relaxing feelings quickly went away which I had picked up from my refreshing walk in the forest with my dog and I was rushing my way to my computer to check some traffic numbers.

Some afterthoughts

Overall, I am quite happy that I have been able to learn how to write in such way that I am able to somehow share my thoughts in a relatively structured and organised manner.

It is surprisingly vulnerable to write articles and posts under your own name, face and domain name, but it is quite rewarding as well.

Even though I would consider Hacker News one of the most savage places to get feedback and attention for articles and posts, I am quite happy what kind of results I received.

Some contacted me directly via email, saying that they loved the article and asked some follow up questions.

It took me until the next day after the submission before I found enough courage to even go read the Hacker News comment section to see what people were talking about.

Of course, some said that the article was trash, but most of the commenters were simply discussing the topic my article was about, which is a great thing.

Stats and analytics

Currently, I am running my website in Cloudflare and using Cloudflare Web Analytics to see some key metrics from my website traffic.

The key numbers can be viewed from the top of this post from the cover photo.

Basically, I received around 7,000 page views in less than 24 hours.

These views came primarily from Hacker News, but also some social sharing was happening at se same time.

Most of the visits were from United States, but a lot of visits were also coming from around the world.

Conclusion

It was an exciting Friday afternoon to end the work week by sharing an article of mine in my personal blog and submitting it to Hacker News.

Most of my posts are not the kinds of posts that would be relevant to be shared in a network such as Hacker News, but it is nice to know that it is possible to get this kind of feedback and attention from this network.

My goal lately has been to simplify my blogging habits and lower the bar for publishing posts in my blog, which is what I am going to be doing going forward.

The post I shared in Hacker News was by no means perfect, had a couple of things I would have written differently if I had known that it would get some minor virality under its wings.