How I Hacked HackerNews to publish Implementing posts using ChatGPT and Node.js
Edition #13
Hey, I'm Marco and welcome to my newsletter!
As a software engineer, I created this newsletter to share my first-hand knowledge of the development world. Each topic we will explore will provide valuable insights, with the goal of inspiring and helping all of you on your journey.
In this episode, I want to show you how I created a system that lets you share posts from the same website multiple times on HackerNews.
You can download all the code shown directly from my Github repository: https://github.com/marcomoauro/hackernews-automation
DISCLAIMER
While it may seem intriguing, it's important to recognize that trying to bypass soft bans or manipulate platforms like HackerNews is unethical and violates their terms of service. This post is purely for educational purposes, undertaken as a personal challenge following Implementing's soft ban. However, I strongly advise against such actions due to the potential legal and reputational consequences.
👋 Introduction
A few weeks back, I found a really interesting post by
on Substack. He explained how he promotes his posts, including sharing them on platforms like HackerNews. Curious, I looked up HackerNews and discovered it's a community focused on IT and entrepreneurship, run by Y Combinator.
In Gregor's post, he talks about how one of his posts made it to the top page, bringing him tons of traffic and new subscribers. That got me excited, so I decided to start sharing my posts there too.
On my second attempt, I published the post around 8 am. While I was riding my scooter 🛵, my phone kept vibrating non-stop. I pulled over and found numerous emails from new subscribers. My post made it to the top page!
Looking at the newsletter statistics, my post totals 5k+ visits and 20 new subscriptions in about one day!
Strategy
After achieving quick results, I decided to post every day. However, after about 10 posts, none of them were receiving likes or visits, making me question whether the topics were engaging enough. After 10 days of this, I started to doubt myself. So, I decided to investigate further using a private browser. To my surprise, I discovered that my new posts weren't appearing at all on the page for new posts.
I checked and read in other posts that while HackerNews allows publishing multiple posts from the same site, it doesn't show these posts in the dedicated feed, meaning nobody sees them.
I couldn't use the Implementing URL anymore.
That's when I switched to my engineering mindset, embraced the challenge, and started searching for a solution.
💡 Solution
Let's summarize the solution I've come up with using this sequence diagram.
I thought of adding an intermediate Frontend. This way, I could use its URL for HackerNews posts and switch it up using Netlify's API, the hosting service for my frontend. That would solve the issue of having the same URL in all posts.
The goal of this frontend is to contact my backend via API by sending it the path after the first "/", then the backend searches the database where I set up a table with the format <path> => <original post on Implementing>. Once it finds the Implementing URL, it simply redirects to the newsletter.
After using it for two weeks to publish five posts a day, I can confidently say it works!
Systems
I implemented these 3 components:
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