Yeah, so about being the best*

Check the front page of HackerNews any day of the year, and you’ll never find a collection of links as wonderful as this. (I say this with absolute certainty, despite not knowing a lick of code myself!) Entertaining, didactic, outrageous — every submission you see here is certifiably timeless. And you don’t have to take my word for it: these links have been submitted to HackerNews on multiple occasions, garnering at least 10 points per submission (which is roughly the amount of points required to reach the front page).⁰

It’s rare that a story gets submitted to HackerNews more than once. Rarer still is a story so compelling that it hits the front page multiple times.

Which blogs are the best?

Dig a bit deeper into the data, and you’ll find even more surprises. For instance, who are the authors of those rare, timeless pieces?

Subdomains are counted separately (e.g. bits.blogs.nytimes.com vs. nytimes.com), as are links with different parameters (e.g. article.html vs. article.html#XYZ). You can discount the GitHub outlier at the top — people like to post their code snippets on HackerNews, but in this piece I’m focusing my analysis on written content.

These are 50 publishers whose stories have been submitted to HackerNews more than once.

You’ll notice that billion dollar media outfits — BBC (9 stories), Bloomberg (9), The Washington Post (7), The Verge (7), The Wall Street Journal (6)— have written fewer timeless stories than mortals like Paul Graham (19), Matt Might (13), James Hague (10), and Ben Horowitz (9).

What’s so special about Matt Might (13) that makes him able to write more “timeless” stories than the entire editorial team at TechCrunch (11)? There are a few reasons. First, writers at major media hubs are expected to publish multiple stories a day, whereas a part-time blogger like Matt (who doesn’t need to blog to pay the bills) can take his time writing a piece until it meets his standard of quality. It’s not as easy to produce something of lasting value when you work for a content farm.

Second, Matt is writing directly for the people who read HackerNews, whereas mainstream media shoots for a broader audience. Nevertheless, it’s reasonable to expect that with their money and resources, mainstream media could find the time to write more than a dozen stories with enduring appeal to hackers.

Those two factors can explain the triumph of small bloggers over large media corporations (within the microcosm of HackerNews), but they can also explain the rise of Medium itself.

By reducing the expectation of prolificacy (since contributors can publish as infrequently as they’d like), Medium encourages its writers to wait until they have something worth writing about before posting. There’s no blog to maintain, no content editor to appease — Medium lets you take your time and decide which stories you want to put your name behind.

What a big surprise, therefore, that those are the type of stories people like to read, again and again!!! In its three years of existence, Medium has published just as many “timeless” stories as The New York Times (33), although granted, Medium publishes more stories per day.