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> HN hug of death Being on the front page of HN (or Reddit for that matter) doesn't bring in as much traffic as you would imagine. It's not insignificant but i

> HN hug of death Being on the front page of HN (or Reddit for that matter) doesn't bring in as much traffic as you would imagine. It's not insignificant but it's not a deluge like what you are picturing. Turns out most people don't bother to click into the article. They head straight for the comments section. Source: work for a company that has been on the front page of both HN and Reddit on many occasions and have seen the traffic.

janmo 6y ago
Based on my experience, If you are on the front page of HN (top 20) you will get around 1 to 5k visitors in total. I think every site should be able to handle it. Reddit brings you less traffic than that. Twitter, Facebook and some Chinese sites can be much more effective. I only experienced a hug of death once and it was a combination of factors. I had a website on a very particular topic, and this topic made big news (this was unexpected), so I got huge amounts of traffic from every where, (Forums, News sites, social media, and mainly Google searches...). I was down for hours my Apache server just kept dying. One day later it was already old news and my traffic quickly returned to normal.