Head to head
Hacker News vs Reddit
Hacker News leads the BLP Index (77 vs 67). Hacker News has more raw reach. Reddit is fairer for founders without a network. Hacker News scores higher on AI visibility.
| Dimension | Hacker News | |
|---|---|---|
| BLP Index | 77 | 67 |
| Rank | #1 | #24 |
| Type | Communities | Communities |
| Cycle | ongoing | ongoing |
| Listing cost | Free | Free |
| Audience | Engineers, founders, researchers, and technically literate operators | Depends entirely on the subreddit — from makers to highly specific professions |
| Traffic | Most posts: little. Front page: hundreds to several thousand. Top posts: 1,000+ upvotes and outsized referral spikes. | Most posts: little. Occasional viral threads: thousands of visits |
| Backlink | Nofollow in most cases; SEO value is the thread ranking, not the link juice | Nofollow; citation and discussion value is the asset |
| Reach | 88 | 82 |
| Intent | 86 | 70 |
| Fairness | 48 | 50 |
| Evergreen | 84 | 62 |
| AI visibility | 88 | 80 |
| Ease | 52 | 48 |
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 guider/SideProject, r/alphaandbetausers, and the niche subreddit where your customers already complain. High variance, high ceiling, zero tolerance for spam.
Reddit is not a platform you “launch on.” It is a collection of communities with incompatible rules. The posts that work read as “I built this because X kept annoying me, here is what happened.” Link dumps get removed and accounts get banned.
Full Reddit guide