thats google analytics. specifically the "live" feature they added to commodify/undercut people who were moving to or splitting their spend with chartbeat (who

thats google analytics. specifically the "live" feature they added to commodify/undercut people who were moving to or splitting their spend with chartbeat (who's main thing was that live-on-site counter). fwiw, the HN hug of death rarely breaks 5-figures for that metric. Its plenty to destroy a wordpress blog on a two core VPS, but its nothing compared to something getting shared in a large facebook group or trending on twitter. News sites are several orders of magnitude larger than any other type of sites besides the mega-platforms (fb) and comms tools like gmail/slack. Its actually a core part of why the entire sector's business model failed together. Everyone chased "reach" (raw audience size) as their most important revenue generating metric (because it directly factored as higher CPMs). Thats how we wound up with dozens of "news" sites all catering to the exact same 100M people clicking awful headlines in facebook shares and then closing the tab to go back to facebook. They (we) solved for scale, but in a way that turned everyone into a commodified copy of each other with no meaningful connection or relationship to the audience. Then facebook just captured all of the ad revenue by gatekeeping/aggregating/"curating".