Growth · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Writing Contests
$$$ For the Best Stories on #Contest-Tags
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Writing Contests launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1IB
Hey HN! Just for fun, I built an interactive Hacker News Simulator. You can submit text posts and links, just like the real HN. But on HN Simulator, all of the comments are generated by LLMs + generate instantly. The best way to use it (IMHO) is to submit a text post or a curl-able URL here: https://news.ysimulator.run/submit. You don't need an account to post. When you do that, various prompts will be built from a library of commenter archetypes, moods, and shapes. The AI commenters will actually respond to your text post and/or submitted link. I really wanted it to feel…
Nov 2025 · news.ysimulator.run · its alternatives →
- 2

- 3HA
Hey there HN! I wanted to share a pet project of mine. I built HackYourNews [1] to scratch a personal itch: Knowing which stories to focus on while browsing aimlessly (though there is a certain joy in that, as well!) HackYourNews uses OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to summarize the destination article as well as the comments section. Summarization of the article is always cached, while summaries of the comments are regenerated if the comments count is >10% (or >10 comments) different. While I styled the homepage to welcome HNers, my preferred view is the Mobile view, accessed from the navbar. This…
2023 · hackyournews.com · its alternatives →
- 4HN
I built this several months ago as I was interested to see how the titles of posts evolve/change on HN. It turns out lots of titles are edited every day (in both subjectively and objectively good and bad ways!) and I've found it interesting to see how titles have evolved. The whole thing is automated and is built around a Ruby script that pulls down the titles on the front page at a frequent interval. Any titles for specific story IDs that change get tracked and rendered out to a static HTML page hosted on Netlify. It runs by itself without incident so far. This has been on Show HN…
2019 · hackernewstitles.netlify.com · its alternatives →
- 5TH
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6

- 7

$17,500 for the best #bitcoin stories
2024 · writingcontests.xyz · its alternatives →
- 8

- 9HH
Hi folks this is a project I worked on with some of my students when I was running an online JS programming course. Although the online course is no more, I finally got around to releasing Hacker Herald with a former instructor and student - thanks Arnav and Archis! To those wondering if there is a need for such a Hacker News front end, I would just point out that most newspaper websites are laid out like this - clearly some people like this kind of layout! Also for some stories a picture really does help - currently there is a HN story titled, "Portland airport grows with expansive mass…
2024 · hackerherald.com · its alternatives →
- 10

Learn how to draw attention to your work from the pros.
2020 · its alternatives →
- 11HN
Dec 2025 · dosaygo-studio.github.io · its alternatives →
- 12

Boost your marketing with No-Code interactive contests
2020 · its alternatives →
- 13

- 14FH
Hi HN! I’ve been lurking for a while, but out of fear of being steamrolled by HN readers or maybe just natural introversion, I’ve always been too scared to post or comment. Which is why 1. this is my first real Hacker News submission 2. my friend Michael and I built "Fake" Hacker News, a place to post and see what AI-generated HN comments might say. Here’s a video of me using fakeHN to test this very submission: https://www.loom.com/share/4b9f4f9d7c77489a86baeb92ec55a1ed?... And an example of one of our generated posts:…
2023 · fakehn.com · its alternatives →
- 15

- 16PT
Hey HN, I hacked together this fun project that lets you play any article on the front page of Hacker News as an interactive text game. You can create a game about anything by going to infinityarcade.com/ You can also use a URL, which is what this page uses. The whole thing is open source: https://github.com/themaximal1st/InfinityArcade
2023 · infinityarcade.com · its alternatives →
- 17

- 18

Join the journey of tech discovery: read & listen on the go!
2023 · its alternatives →
- 19

People Who Blog Simply Win More 🏆
Nov 2025 · courses.hackernoon.com · its alternatives →
- 20

- 21IC
2021 · hitthefrontpage.com · its alternatives →
- 22SH
The concept was to rethink the way we browsed Craigslist and shopped online. The main section, the "homepage" is a tree map of recent craigslist posting sorted by popularity using a slightly modified version of Hacker News' ranking algorithm. The newest page is a masonry view of the realtime stream of the craiglist posts as they are added to the system (much like Hacker News' newest page.) The top page is the masonry view version of the homepage. The game page is a FaceMash-like game for the posts, which influences the overall scores and popularity of items.
2011 · 5thavenue.chartboost.com · its alternatives →
- 23CS
Thesis: Sites that do well on hacker news will tend to be sites with high quality content. Tools: Hacker News Big Query, python, Google CSE Steps: 1. Using HN Big Query, get all unique domains with more than 3 stories with more than 50 points (query link [1]). Sort by percentage of such stories to total number of stories. By doing that, at the top you will get sites like blog.geoffralston.com that have 3 out of 3 submitted stories get more than 50 points (100% !). Or lucumr.pocoo.org had 46 out of 124 total stories reach 50+ points! Talking about good writing. We cut the list at 2,500 sites…
2019 · its alternatives →
- 24PC
Personal blogs are my favorite part of Hacker News, so I was curious to find out which ones are the most popular. There are tools for finding popular individual posts on HN, but I'd never found anything that aggregates scores across multiple submissions for the same domain, so I decided to build one. I also had a vain curiosity about how my own blog compared to other popular HN authors like Simon Willison and Dan Luu. I had fun making this, as it helped me discover a lot of high-quality personal blogs that weren't on my radar, especially from the earlier days of HN. Suggestions, questions,…
2025 · refactoringenglish.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →