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Poll: How often do you visit HN?
I just wanted to see how addicted we really are to Hacker News.
- lemming 16y agoRecently I'm down to a couple of times a week, and it's been great. I've recently finally restarted an old part time project I had kicking around gathering dust, and since I actually starting having something better to do in my spare time I don't feel the urge as much. When I read HN a lot I get a pretty strong paranoid feeling that I'm going to be missing out on lots of amazing stuff that I won't be able to live without, but it turns out I can live without it just fine.
- jasonshen 16y agoThe data here is likely going to be biased towards the people who actually DO check HN all the time even if there are more of the once in a while folks unless you factor in the likelihood each group in seeing this poll before it gets buried.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- njs12345 16y agoI wonder if there's some statistical technique you could use to correct for this..
- astrofinch 16y agoFigure out how long the poll stays on the home page. For each group, scale that group's number up by the reciprocal of the probability of a person seeing the poll conditional on their membership in that group. (This conditional probability will be equal to min(the amount of time the poll stays on the home page divided by the average length between visits for a member of that group, 1).) This assumes a person's visits are evenly distributed with time, and that members of all groups are equally likely to respond to the poll if they see it. Probably less frequent visitors are less likely to have registered accounts and therefore less likely to respond to the poll if they see it.
- sev 16y agoNot placing the poll on HN will help a little... ;) 1.) Need a random sample 2.) Need large enough sample size I guess placing the poll on another popular site (not in the same genre as HN, preferably) would help
- shadowpwner 16y agoOh, but doesn't that mean you're measuring Hacker News to another popular site?
- martinkallstrom 16y agoAnd the link would immediately be posted and upvoted on HN, nullifying the effort.
- T_S_ 16y agoHere's quick correction: Toss out the poll look in the server log. (Requires access to server log)
- NathanKP 16y agoI follow the Twitter bot so I can get updates, but I still find myself checking the site frequently to see if there are replies to any of my comments.
- matthavener 16y agoI tend to complete forget about my comments
- solipsist 16y agoNotifo (http://notifo.com/ http://notifo.com/) can help you with notifying you when you have replies to your comments, although you still need to visit the site to find out what they are.
- rflrob 16y agoI tend to use my karma as a proxy for whether I have replies to my comments. I figure if people are up-voting, then it was a worthwhile contribution, and they might be responding as well.
- dreaming 16y agoEschewing the usefulness of rss and similar solutions, the endless articles on productivity and discipline, and ultimately all good sense, I find myself visiting hacker news more times per day than a productive person would/should... and it looks like perhaps i'm not alone
- kgermino 16y agoIt needs an option for "Way too much." Unless that's meant to be covered by 10+ times a day. It's time well spent though.
- dustingetz 16y agonot necessarily--i typically click on at least one link every time, but if i only check it once every evening, i don't waste time on garbage links, and the comments are already mature
- mikeklaas 16y agoI don't see how HN 10 times a day could be considered time well spent. That's a LOT of interruptions. [disclosure: I picked 5-10 times a day]
- Retric 16y agoYou could set it as your browsers home page. I mean mine is set to Google, but I could always just use the search bar.
- roxstar 16y agoIt would be a lot if everytime you are reading articles and comments, I can say I probably check hacker news more than 10 times and most of the time it is just skimming for articles that sound interesting to me, usually I only end up reading a few articles/comment threads a day.
- FD3SA 16y agoTell me about it. Was on a date last Friday and couldn't resist checking it when my lady friend checked her phone for the time. I showed her what I was reading and she was floored. Her attitude became far more amiable since she believed I was going to be the next Julian Assange. Thank you pg! P.S. As a kid, I always dreamed of a secret online community where the world's smartest people gathered to discuss highly relevant and interesting subjects. When I saw Eliezer Yudkowsky reply to a post by Paul Buchheit, I knew I had found the promised land. P.P.S. We need a poll that asks how many of us quit our jobs due to pg's work and/or HN. You'd have at least one vote from me :)
- blhack 16y agoIt really depends. Some days I'm commenting and submitting and reading and interacting a lot, and sometimes I'll go for a few days without saying or really reading anything.
- electromagnetic 16y agoI can do the same. I'll check once a day for say a week, then I'll post frequently and check several times a day (considering I'm away from a computer for my job, it's a feat when I can check 5+ times) and then randomly I won't check for a few days to a week.
- PureSin 16y agoToo often, I really should focus more on doing stuff rather than reading about others doing their stuff.
- TGJ 16y agoKnowing that I can't do it all, I like to read about the rest.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- solipsist 16y agoThe number and rate at which people are choosing 10+ is almost frightening. However, it's definitely predictable - as well as comforting to know that we are not alone. jasonshen brings up a good point by saying that the data will be biased towards the people who check HN more often. This is true and, while I don't expect this to be a formal, or even accurate, poll in any way whatsoever, it seems as if it has reached the front page - which may help. For example, if this stays there a little longer, we'll have a better idea of the number of people who check 10+ times a day in comparison to those who check 1-5.
- aheilbut 16y agoAlso - how much more frequently do you check right after you've posted an article or reply?
- emilepetrone 16y agoToo often
- davito88 16y agoI subscribe to the RSS feed. Pull it every hour. I guess that's 24x a day...
- solipsist 16y agoAs a follow-up, I should post: Poll: Are you ashamed of how much time you spend on HN? However, that would be pointless as I think we all know the answer...
- sz 16y agoI'm not sure actually.
- jtinel 16y agoI'm going to lie and say 5-10 because I hope to god its not much more than that.
- jetjune 16y ago3 times a day. Is that bad?
- eccp 16y agoActually I check HN via Google Reader, and I open the actual page only when [I think] the discussion around a link may interest me.
- ivankirigin 16y agoWhy doesn't pg write a script to show this histogram across all users? I hope every hit is logged.
- gsivil 16y agoWeekdays: I check it at most 3 times when I am at work, and when I finally get home I load a tab and I check it at least 80-100 times till I sleep! Weekend: A constantly loaded tab that I check 5-10 per home hour. Since day could be the whole 24h thing I naturally voted for 100+..sorry 10+
- wmboy 16y agoIt (obviously) depends whether I have a computer in front of me that day...
- sabj 16y agoBetter response: more often than I should.
- elvirs 16y agoit is in one of the tabs almost all the time and I just hit refresh when I feel like reading something new or just checking how my comments are doing.
- david_shaw 16y ago10+ times a day? That seems an awful lot! ~8:20 am: Check HN on iPhone while getting ready for work. Make mental note of top stories. 9:00 am: Load HN in a tab at work 12:00 pm: Check HN before leaving for lunch. Usually a quick peruse as I finish up my tasks before my coworkers and I head out. Again, I take a mental note of the top stories of the day. 12:45 pm: Now that I'm back from lunch, I will read a few of the stories, sometimes leave a comment or two, before delving into my afternoon projects. 5:30 pm: Home from work! Time to check HN (and Reddit, etc). So I guess that's five times per day, during the workday. When I get home, I easily refresh another five times. But, hey, that must be awesome for pg's analytics, right?!
- jawee 16y agoI usually just pull it up on my phone a few times a day and bookmark relevant links to read later (Opera Mobile syncs with my desktop). It depends on how many times I am in a position to randomly check on my phone more than anything and it´s not too often that I get on from my computer.
- swah 16y agoAbout 50 times a day, on bad days.
- Brooklyn 16y ago2 or 3 times a day. I am preparing exam now. After that, maybe 5 or more times~
- nathanwdavis 16y agotoo much!!
- blhack 16y agoAm I the only person that doesn't really think that 10 times is that much? It wouldn't surprise me if I check it more than 30 times on days that I check it a lot. Wake up and lay in bed for a few minutes...check HN. Waiting in line for coffee or something? Check HN... On hold on the phone? Check HN... Load HN on my computer and maybe skim an article or something... and so on. I think that the confusion might be coming from how some of us check HN. I'm actually reading an article only very rarely, and only commenting even more rarely. Usually it's just a quick skim of the headlines to see if anything interesting is happening in the world. How many times do some of you glance out the window when you're sitting at your desk? More than 10? Maybe a better analogy is: how many times do you glance at the clock? The clock is meaningless to your work, it's just a status update about your surroundings. Same thing, at least to me, about HN. It isn't about actually reading anything, it's just about getting a quick status update about what's going on. I'd bet that >70% of my visits to HN are less than a minute long.
- solipsist 16y agoYes, I contemplated using the amount of time users spent on HN rather than the number of sessions in this poll. However, the former is probably harder for users to estimate.
- nopinsight 16y agoMaybe there should be a question: How long is your typical visit to HN? to complement this one. Poll Added: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2091261 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2091261
- Keyframe 16y agoIn my case by following @newsyc20 on twitter amount of visits dropped sharply - but it is still high!
- wildmXranat 16y agoToo much. In fact, there is a plateau past which repeated checking turns up no new posts and comments. Haha, but seriously, quite often and closer to 10^2 times a day.
- angdis 16y agoIt's not addiction as much as it is boredom and a thirst for novelty. I only recently discovered HN and added it to my RSS feed. Probably should do something about out-of-control RSS reading one of these days. It takes an outrageous amount of time albeit interstitial time between actual tasks. As far as "addictions" go, RSS-reading isn't so bad compared to say... heroin, chewing-tobacco, alcoholism, violence, smoking and philandering.
- michaelty 16y agoI visit HN while in the bathroom. (TMI?)
- ubasu 16y agoBoys and girls! Set noprocrast to yes to reclaim your lives! ;-)
- drawkbox 16y agoI definitely have a case of the CTRL/CMD+N then 'n' and it is just too easy, it is right there in the history. Code compiling (CTRL/CMD+N then 'n'), db query taking > .0005ms (CTRL/CMD+N then 'n'), pondering the change I just made (CTRL/CMD+N then 'n'), etc etc and on and on.
- netchaos 16y ago5-10 times a day, I have pinned HN to my chrome's most visited list.
- scottjad 16y agoI can't help but think that Hacker News has made several design decisions that are geared specifically to keep people coming back over and over and over again. Some that come to mind are not notifying you when someone replies to you, not having feeds for comments on a story, and not having a feeds for the beststories or bestcomments pages.
- karl11 16y agoA better question is: Why is HN so addictive?
- dools 16y agoWhile we're on the subject of skimming HN let me just say that Instapaper is your friend!
- solipsist 16y agoWow. As of 9:12 PM Pacific time on 1/10/11, the '5-10 times a day' and '1-5 times a day' categories both have 247 points. Almost every time I've checked, they've been with in a few points of each other. For such a huge sample size, this is a surprise to me.
- roadnottaken 16y agoWhy is that surprising? Those options have the same frequency.
- aero142 16y agoWhat I really want is to get the data from the server and compare the poll response with the actual number for each user. As in, "you reported that you check 1-5 times, but you average 12.7 on work days."
- solipsist 16y agoGreat idea, but do we know for sure if pg has access to this data?
- ajaimk 16y agoI set it up as my new tab homepage
- forkrulassail 16y agoI replaced the Twitter and Facebook crack with the HN Codein2
- comster 16y agoWhy don't more people use google reader I wonder?
- trustfundbaby 16y agoits in my bookmarks bar in Chrome ... when I'm bored for even 5 seconds or ahem waiting for my code to compile ... clicky clicky ... then ... 15 minutes gone!
- yason 16y agonoprocrast is a life saver. About anything that doesn't happen immediately causes me fairly too often to take a look at HN. I much prefer coding without internet.
- jermy 16y agoTrue, although I often fall into a worse trap when that 'Get back to work!' message comes up by seeing what's on Reddit instead.
- apoo 16y ago5+ times a day
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mstevens 16y agofar far too often.
- henryw 16y agoalmost every time i use my browser, the first site i visit is hacker news. better hacker news though than something like tmz.com
- cfontes 16y agoThe site is left open for the whole day here... just hitting F5 when I get some free time.
- hispanic 16y agoWow, talk about user engagement. I subscribe via email using Feed My Inbox. I like that delivery mechanism because it limits my interaction with the site, which can be a little consuming. :P
- martincmartin 16y agoI always wished the decay with time was normalized by the number of visits someone makes per day. That way, when someone visits frequently, they're often see more stuff, but if someone only visits once a week, they'll see the highest rated stuff over the past week (and some lower rated stuff from the last few days). Perhaps not completely normalized by number of visits, but at least nudged a little by number of visits, to produce the user experience mentioned in the above paragraph.
- paufernandez 16y agoTried anti-procrast check box, didn't work...
- AndrewDucker 16y agoHowever often Google Reader hits the RSS feed. I only visit when there's a headline I like.
- pge 16y agoIt would be interesting to see if the data from the poll match the log data. I'm always curious about the accuracy of self-reporting in polls like this, with the ingoing assumption that people tend to be more estimators of frequency either with an aspirational bias (how often they think they should do something) or just a recent history bias (if I have done something a few times recently, I likely overestimate how often I do it). Lots of reported conclusions depend on polls like this. Since in this case the real data may be available in the logs of HN, it would be more interesting to me to see the comparison of real v. reported than it is to see the actual answers.
- rpetrov 16y ago@newsyc100 ftw.
- adroit_dibs 16y ago5 times a day ? Its really is very refreshing to come across so many ideas/opinions et all