If you’re building something technical or fleshing out a technical idea and want to share your work with the world, two communities consistently emerge as the best distribution platforms: Hacker News and Indie Hackers. Both attract builders and drive meaningful traffic, but they reward different kinds of content and attract different audiences. Here’s a brief overview of the evolution of both and how to pick the right one for your content.
The history of Hacker News
Hacker News is an upvote-based news aggregation platform created by Paul Graham as Y Combinator project in 2007. It was originally called Startup News and sometimes News.YC, but after a few months, rechristened with the iconic name that’s lasted nearly two decades. Hacker News features content of all forms: research papers, personal blogs, code repositories, etc. Each post, regardless of its original mode of content, features a comment section on the site where other users can engage in robust debate.
Initially, Hacker News was meant to emulate the community of early Reddit. The site was built with Arc as a side project to facilitate news exchange between YC founders—it quickly began to reach users beyond the originally intended audience. From Graham’s point of view, Hacker News’ purpose wasn’t just to reach the highest number of unique users but to foster intelligent conversation. As he puts it, community sites are ruined not just by “bad users” but “bad behavior”, and that user behavior is highly malleable; if you log onto a site with the understanding that this is a place on the internet where people behave with respect and critical thought, you too will behave with respect and critical thought. In that vein, you have to earn the right to act negatively: you can’t downvote until you have 501 karma points and you can’t flag comments until you have 30 karma points. Karma points = a user’s upvotes - downvotes.
The site is now moderated by Daniel Gackle (user dang) and Tom Howard (tomhow). Visually, it maintains a simple, text-forward, and information-dense character, with a 2000s vintage.
You can create an account through the site’s simple “login” button in the top right and, once logged in, create a post with a title, url, and background text by clicking “submit”. Both buttons are in the orange header strip at the top of the page.
The history of Indie Hackers
Indie Hackers was created by Courtland Allen in August of 2016. Allen is an alum of Y Combinator himself; he participated in the Winter 2011 batch for an email-task conversion company called Taskforce. In April of 2017, Indie Hackers was acquired by Stripe and Allen’s brother, Channing, joined as a cofounder. Six years after the acquistion, the site became indie once more—the two brothers became majority shareholders and Stripe continued on as an investor in the platform.
Indie Hackers is a platform for entrepreneurs, which Allen defines as anyone who has set out to make money independently, not through an employer. It’s a place where the founders of profitable businesses and side projects can share stories and learn from each other. The founder label isn’t discriminatory; builders who are non-profitable, cofounders, and haven’t raised money can be indie hackers too.
The site is a blogging platform rather than an aggregation of a wide range of content; each post first shows the writer’s project or personal website, their name and Indie Hackers revenue, and then leads a reader to the blog itself, which fits into a traditional style universal across the platform. There’s no downvote option—the site moderates via a report button and the comment section.
The homepage of Indie Hackers features a split feed: the left half is community-generated posts with upvotes and comments and the right features posts by user IndieJames, whose articles feature founders’ stories and, once you’ve read enough, require you to register for a free account to read.
Create an account on Indie Hackers by clicking “Join” in the top right of the homepage and specifying your business goals. You aren’t able to make posts as a newbie until you’ve engaged with the community robustly via comments or by signing up for their premium tier, Indie Hackers Plus. But if chosen by the moderators, you’ll be able to post via the submit button. You can set up an advertisement at any point.
When is Hacker News the right forum?
Hacker News rewards intellectual curiosity and the community responds well to technical depth and novel ideas. The audience skews toward engineers, researchers, and people who like arguing about programming languages.
Classic Hacker News posts:
- Technical deep-dive on a bug or system design
- Product launch announcement, focused on technical nuggets
- Research paper/academic work
- Open source projects
- Driving traffic to a pre-existing technical blog
When is Indie Hackers the right forum?
Indie Hackers rewards stories about founder journeys and can be a great place to meet other builders and share entrepreneurship learnings: what you built, how you’ve grown, what’s working, and what isn’t. The audience is more solo founders, bootstrappers, and people building side projects into businesses.
Classic Indie Hackers posts:
- Sharing revenue milestones (revenue transparency is central to IH culture, while HN is skeptical of self-promotion)
- Product launch announcement, focused on founder story
- “How I got my first 100 users”
- Seeking founder community/partnerships
Conclusion
Neither platform is inherently better; each presents its own advantages that you’ll find useful at different points in your career and with different projects. The builders who get the most from both are the ones who participate genuinely—meeting community behavioral standards and engaging in rich discussion about others’ work. Start as an observer: read what performs well, notice what gets pushback, and you’ll develop a feel for what each community values.
