Head to head
Hacker News vs HackerNoon
Hacker News leads the BLP Index (77 vs 68). Hacker News has more raw reach. HackerNoon is fairer for founders without a network. Hacker News scores higher on AI visibility.
| Dimension | Hacker News | HackerNoon |
|---|---|---|
| BLP Index | 77 | 68 |
| Rank | #1 | #20 |
| Type | Communities | Communities |
| Cycle | ongoing | ongoing |
| Listing cost | Free | Free to publish (community rules apply) |
| Audience | Engineers, founders, researchers, and technically literate operators | Developers and operators who still read articles |
| Traffic | Most posts: little. Front page: hundreds to several thousand. Top posts: 1,000+ upvotes and outsized referral spikes. | Search + homepage if the story is actually good |
| Backlink | Nofollow in most cases; SEO value is the thread ranking, not the link juice | Editorial/profile links; quality depends on the piece |
| Reach | 88 | 68 |
| Intent | 86 | 62 |
| Fairness | 48 | 64 |
| Evergreen | 84 | 86 |
| AI visibility | 88 | 70 |
| Ease | 52 | 50 |
Hacker News
A Show HN post is plain text, no scheduling, and no gallery. Most sink. The ones that connect can outdraw a #1 Product Hunt day and rank in Google for years.
Hacker News is not a launch board. It is a news community with a Show HN convention for things you made. There is no hunter, no thumbnail, and no way to rally a private Slack without getting flagged. The entire bet is whether the artifact is interesting to skeptical engineers.
Full Hacker News guideHackerNoon
An article that ranks can outlive every hunt board. A dump of your landing page will not. Editorial, not a submit-a-product form.
HackerNoon is a tech publishing site with a huge crawled archive. Founders who write a specific build log or teardown get a URL that search and assistants reuse. Founders who paste a press release get ignored.
Full HackerNoon guide