Tues/Weds.

Monday theres too much going on. Friday nobody cares because it's the start of the weekend. Tues/Weds gives you time to deal with bugs and problems that crop up after millions of users flood your site after the announcement.

Sundays at 2:27 PST. But you just missed it so you'll have to wait until next week.

This is a serious question.

Consider for example making a submission to reddit or digg. When would be a good time to do so to maximize the expected number of people who will check it out?

At this point, Digg and Reddit are hard to use unless you game them. It's so random as to whether it gets dugg/buried or up'd/down'd at the beginning. I hope you have a lot of friends with the right accounts or a way of paying $1/Digg.

Well, you used to be able to cheat your way to the top of Reddit - http://reddit.com/info/1e7za/comments - but spez fixed that little hole.

You probably can still do it on Digg - I went after Reddit because I figured it'd be harder, but I bet Digg is full of XSS and XSRF vulnerabilities.

For that matter, use something small and fun like 2prong.com to pump out fake accounts. Digg yourself 30 times or so and you'll be headed up

Agreed for sites like reddit, digg, maybe even closer to 330 or 4am on Sunday. None of the usual, intelligent users are on at that time to be critical of your site or discredit the comments you leave. Everyone is just blindly voting.

Of course, press releases are probably the most reliable and effective way.

In the PR business, tuesday is considered the best day to make announcements. At least, positive ones.

Friday after the market closes is when all the dirt comes out, at least that's what it seems from reading footnoted.org.

why?

I'm going to guess that Monday is the worst, because people are miserable they just got into work, as well as swamped with additional work that came about over the weekend. Friday sucks because people want to go home and be done with that week. Few people work on the weekend. Tuesday is best because it must give a person four business days for followup. Any reporter/businessperson/client who wants to reach the company has time to do so over the next few days. That would be my guess.

Great reasoning. Here's a quote from the Joel discussion board.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.470472.11 "This is from a P.R. pro. Monday is the day that most announcements go out. You still want it to be early in the week but to avoid the crowd, it makes sense to do it on Tuesday."

The odd thing is everybody followed this advice it wouldn't work. So the sluggish Monday idea is pretty compelling :)

I've noticed weekends are nice because few folks are launching--and bloggers are more chill and likely to review your submission. Just a general thing I've noticed.

With that said, we launched Monday afternoon. Made to digg frontpage Tuesday evening; TechCrunch on Thursday 4-5am EST.

-Zaid

Time is less important than the number of friends you have spamming it all at the same time.

Suppose you are not going to have any friends spamming in that way.

If you want to get your stuff on a social news site you'd better start making friends now. A disproportionate numbers of diggs on the front page come from a small percentage of users.

I realize that the middle of the week has the highest internet traffic. But high traffic might result in your submission being swamped by other people's submissions.

Define your desired outcome. Then determine your strategy based on the goal. An endeavor that fails to prepare is an endeavor prepare to fail.

The best time is the present. Right now.

Overthinking generally leads to underperforming.

i'd say ASAP, if you have a product worth shouting about