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This is fascinating to me, thanks for the data, and congrats! One interesting comparison I have is the day I got my first web company's first slashdot post, ro

This is fascinating to me, thanks for the data, and congrats! One interesting comparison I have is the day I got my first web company's first slashdot post, roughly 2000, maybe late 1999. I don't still have the logs, but we had significantly more clickthroughs, on the order of 50 to 100k if I recall correctly. Given the HN 'pageview per day' numbers I've been reading, I find the clickthrough rate surprisingly low; especially because the way I read HN is to click through to almost everything on the homepage. Other thoughts on this? It seems like a techcrunch or (even? slashdot) article would be worth more, which surprises me. Well, techcrunch doesn't surprise me. I guess I'm wondering what size / demographic community we're all in here.

tansey 16y ago
Thanks! Glad you like the article! My advisor from grad school had a blog post on the front page as well, with similar vote counts. He tracked about 5,000 UV total for the 48 hour period it was popular (24 hours on the front page). So the views seemed in line with my expectations. I think the value of HackerNews is not in the quantity but the quality of users. I only had two spam/garbage posts on my blog, and no spam signups that I noticed. At its core, this community is a set of really passionate, generally positive early-adopters.
Swizec 16y ago
A lot of people come to HN for the commentary, not so much for the post. What I've noticed is that I will usually read only the comments and only click through to the page if it seems exceptionally interesting. That is to say, the opinion of the HN crowd on a topic, matters more (and/or is more useful) than the topic itself.
- vessenes 16y ago
  Yes, I agree with this use case for HN completely, and it ties to my experience. Compared with say slashdot in 2000, interactivity is easier and generally more interesting here. At the time, there were very few social aggregators, so the use cases were different.

tansey 16y ago

Thanks! Glad you like the article! My advisor from grad school had a blog post on the front page as well, with similar vote counts. He tracked about 5,000 UV total for the 48 hour period it was popular (24 hours on the front page). So the views seemed in line with my expectations. I think the value of HackerNews is not in the quantity but the quality of users. I only had two spam/garbage posts on my blog, and no spam signups that I noticed. At its core, this community is a set of really passionate, generally positive early-adopters.

Swizec 16y ago

A lot of people come to HN for the commentary, not so much for the post. What I've noticed is that I will usually read only the comments and only click through to the page if it seems exceptionally interesting. That is to say, the opinion of the HN crowd on a topic, matters more (and/or is more useful) than the topic itself.

vessenes 16y ago
Yes, I agree with this use case for HN completely, and it ties to my experience. Compared with say slashdot in 2000, interactivity is easier and generally more interesting here. At the time, there were very few social aggregators, so the use cases were different.