Creating Hacker News Share Links Seeded with a URL and Title
I was building out simple share links for a client a while back; they’re a technical client, so a lot of their content makes more sense on Twitter and Hacker News than say, Facebook. Hacker News is a great source of traffic and engagement from a hyper-technical audience, but its sharing ecosystem isn’t super baked out: we wanted a way to pre-seed a link submission with a URL and title, but couldn’t find an obvious way.
If you’re looking for the same thing: let me save you another five minutes of Googling!
Here’s all you have to do:
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=http://google.com&t=Google
All you have to do is hit /submitlink instead of /submit, and supply the URL in u= and the title in t=. (Both are optional, if you want to omit them for any reason.)
Here’s a clickable version of that exact link – try tinkering with the URL and title values to see how it works:
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=http://google.com&t=Google
Or, if you’d like, you can try the share link right below this post to see how it works 😉