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This doesn’t really align with the reality. HN’s audience is not heavily concentrated in Silicon Vally or the U.S. - less than 10% of the audience is based arou

This doesn’t really align with the reality. HN’s audience is not heavily concentrated in Silicon Vally or the U.S. - less than 10% of the audience is based around Silicon Valley [1]. Most discussion about Silicon Valley companies, individuals and culture is critical and negative. At any time there are multiple articles about “obscure hacking” topics on the front page. Right now there are 10, by my count - though others may count fewer of course. But when I talk to hacker types about HN, they always comment on the cool obscure articles they find here. All the content can’t always by obscure, can it? Surely if everything is obscure, nothing is. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26916747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26916747

cblconfederate 5y ago
Discussion fora are usually dominated by a minority. You won't read about the habits, diets and anxieties (housing, options, politics, tools, city life, commute) of people from berlin , moscow , paris, melbourne, while you learn the people, areas and streets of SF by name. HN is a megaphone for globalizing the SV culture.
- achow 5y ago
  Techies from Berlin, Bangalore, Moscow.. come here to live vicariously (SV culture).
- tomhoward 5y ago
  > You won't read about the habits, diets and anxieties (housing, options, politics, tools, city life, commute) of people from berlin , moscow , paris, melbourne This seems like a non sequitur from your original complaint (not enough obscure tech content). But still, this is not my perception at all. HN gets many fantastic comments from people sharing their perspective of their home location and culture. I’m in Melbourne and over the years have written plenty of comments about life in my city and country that were solidly upvoted and well received. It’s natural that a lot of the discussion on a tech forum will focus on SV being the place where most of the biggest tech companies are, but the real value in HN is the long tail of unique content and comments from all over the world. As I mentioned in another comment [1], the “notice-dislike” bias, often mentioned here by dang, is a powerful phenomenon, which can lead us to focus too much on what we dislike and overlook the stuff that we do like and that is right there to be found if we take a moment to notice it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814878
  - onethought 5y ago
    I think I agree with the GP here. A lot of discussion is US centric. Even to the point where people will bring up esoteric Prop-xx legal references and be upvoted as if that is at all relevant in a global context. I don’t believe the 10% number of SV participation. If it really is 10% I want to know the percentage of contributing commenters. For instance, I have seen very little Melbourne centric content at all here. Perhaps Canva (though that’s Sydney) and only because of their insane valuation and relationship back into the valley. Given the Timezone difference, there should be a time period where Australian content dominates, but I don’t even see that.
    - tomhoward 5y ago
      > there should be a time period where Australian content dominates There is absolutely a time window when you’re more likely to see articles about Australia here; late afternoon and evening when people in the US should be asleep (notwithstanding the number of insomniac hackers likely to exist in a country of 330M people). Recently there have been big discussions about the Vic earthquake, the Vic/NSW pandemic response, the new military alliance, and there are always big discussions about new Australian laws relating to surveillance and tech/media interference. You won’t get a time where Melbourne or Sydney dominates every day, as there are many other major cities awake during the same time (there are plenty of big stories about Europe during the US quiet period). And big stories about FAANG companies will always get a lot of traffic/discussion as they affect people around the world fairly equally. > A lot of discussion is US centric I didn’t and don’t dispute that. But the claim was that content/discussion about/by topics/people elsewhere is almost completely drowned out, which is not accurate. It’s an understandable perception, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny if you look closely at the stories and comments.
      - onethought 5y ago
        A second point, there is a huge Asian tech scene that feels very under represented here. I’m going to guess that’s more to do with there probably being cooler Chinese language versions of HN out there… but I don’t know. There is just as much tech/innovation/startups happening in China… but you wouldn’t know reading HN.
- usrusr 5y ago
  > You won't read about the habits, diets and anxieties (housing, options, politics, tools, city life, commute) of people from berlin , moscow , paris, melbourne, while you learn the people, areas and streets of SF by name. Is that even true? I feel (as in: likely a misperception) that I learn more about life in Berlin these days on hn than from real life, and I have visited many times, trains run twice an hour and I have friends and family there. Sure, there's the occasional council level politics topics about some SV thing but that's rare. Plenty of platforms offer hard focus on a topic, for any topic, no scarcity on that front. The achievement of hn is broadness of scopewithout losing identity. It's great.
jimbob45 5y ago
+1 to this. You're not going to find a Common Lisp/OCaml/Zig/Derek Lowe thread with 100+ replies ever but you're going to find quality discussion in any thread about them and your questions in those threads will rarely sit unanswered.
eirki 5y ago
If 10% are located in and around one location and the rest are spread around the world, then that would definitely count as 'heavily concentrated' in my book
- tomhoward 5y ago
  Sure, you can interpret it that way! But the original complaint seemed to imply that a majority (ie more that 50%) of content/discussion here is about/by Silicon Valley topics/ people. If 90% of usage is outside SV, that leaves plenty of room for content/discussion that is not focused on SV, which is exactly what we see. But let’s not get into a debate about the meaning of vague terms like “heavily” :)
  - jart 5y ago
    If you think content about your local patch of land on this ball of mud is more interesting to hackers than ideas then you're doing it wrong. I live in California, but one thing I love about night owl Hacker News is that stories about low-level assembly hacks are more likely to reach the front page, because the Russians and Eastern Europeans are online, and they have an appreciation for assembly like it's poetry, and that's simply an attitude that's hard to find around here in California where your colleagues will look at you like you're green if you're not using the latest new-fangled online framework tool created by the startup next door.
ximeng 5y ago
Unscientific and outdated but there were a couple of polls on locations. In US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583918 Which US state: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5222370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5222370 Worldwide: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582647 https://imgur.com/a/xOAvftj https://imgur.com/a/xOAvftj for charts https://pastebin.com/77KGTfwe https://pastebin.com/77KGTfwe for data

cblconfederate 5y ago

Discussion fora are usually dominated by a minority. You won't read about the habits, diets and anxieties (housing, options, politics, tools, city life, commute) of people from berlin , moscow , paris, melbourne, while you learn the people, areas and streets of SF by name. HN is a megaphone for globalizing the SV culture.

achow 5y ago
Techies from Berlin, Bangalore, Moscow.. come here to live vicariously (SV culture).
tomhoward 5y ago
> You won't read about the habits, diets and anxieties (housing, options, politics, tools, city life, commute) of people from berlin , moscow , paris, melbourne This seems like a non sequitur from your original complaint (not enough obscure tech content). But still, this is not my perception at all. HN gets many fantastic comments from people sharing their perspective of their home location and culture. I’m in Melbourne and over the years have written plenty of comments about life in my city and country that were solidly upvoted and well received. It’s natural that a lot of the discussion on a tech forum will focus on SV being the place where most of the biggest tech companies are, but the real value in HN is the long tail of unique content and comments from all over the world. As I mentioned in another comment [1], the “notice-dislike” bias, often mentioned here by dang, is a powerful phenomenon, which can lead us to focus too much on what we dislike and overlook the stuff that we do like and that is right there to be found if we take a moment to notice it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814878
- onethought 5y ago
  I think I agree with the GP here. A lot of discussion is US centric. Even to the point where people will bring up esoteric Prop-xx legal references and be upvoted as if that is at all relevant in a global context. I don’t believe the 10% number of SV participation. If it really is 10% I want to know the percentage of contributing commenters. For instance, I have seen very little Melbourne centric content at all here. Perhaps Canva (though that’s Sydney) and only because of their insane valuation and relationship back into the valley. Given the Timezone difference, there should be a time period where Australian content dominates, but I don’t even see that.
  - tomhoward 5y ago
    > there should be a time period where Australian content dominates There is absolutely a time window when you’re more likely to see articles about Australia here; late afternoon and evening when people in the US should be asleep (notwithstanding the number of insomniac hackers likely to exist in a country of 330M people). Recently there have been big discussions about the Vic earthquake, the Vic/NSW pandemic response, the new military alliance, and there are always big discussions about new Australian laws relating to surveillance and tech/media interference. You won’t get a time where Melbourne or Sydney dominates every day, as there are many other major cities awake during the same time (there are plenty of big stories about Europe during the US quiet period). And big stories about FAANG companies will always get a lot of traffic/discussion as they affect people around the world fairly equally. > A lot of discussion is US centric I didn’t and don’t dispute that. But the claim was that content/discussion about/by topics/people elsewhere is almost completely drowned out, which is not accurate. It’s an understandable perception, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny if you look closely at the stories and comments.
    - onethought 5y ago
      A second point, there is a huge Asian tech scene that feels very under represented here. I’m going to guess that’s more to do with there probably being cooler Chinese language versions of HN out there… but I don’t know. There is just as much tech/innovation/startups happening in China… but you wouldn’t know reading HN.
usrusr 5y ago
> You won't read about the habits, diets and anxieties (housing, options, politics, tools, city life, commute) of people from berlin , moscow , paris, melbourne, while you learn the people, areas and streets of SF by name. Is that even true? I feel (as in: likely a misperception) that I learn more about life in Berlin these days on hn than from real life, and I have visited many times, trains run twice an hour and I have friends and family there. Sure, there's the occasional council level politics topics about some SV thing but that's rare. Plenty of platforms offer hard focus on a topic, for any topic, no scarcity on that front. The achievement of hn is broadness of scopewithout losing identity. It's great.

jimbob45 5y ago

+1 to this. You're not going to find a Common Lisp/OCaml/Zig/Derek Lowe thread with 100+ replies ever but you're going to find quality discussion in any thread about them and your questions in those threads will rarely sit unanswered.

eirki 5y ago

If 10% are located in and around one location and the rest are spread around the world, then that would definitely count as 'heavily concentrated' in my book

tomhoward 5y ago
Sure, you can interpret it that way! But the original complaint seemed to imply that a majority (ie more that 50%) of content/discussion here is about/by Silicon Valley topics/ people. If 90% of usage is outside SV, that leaves plenty of room for content/discussion that is not focused on SV, which is exactly what we see. But let’s not get into a debate about the meaning of vague terms like “heavily” :)
- jart 5y ago
  If you think content about your local patch of land on this ball of mud is more interesting to hackers than ideas then you're doing it wrong. I live in California, but one thing I love about night owl Hacker News is that stories about low-level assembly hacks are more likely to reach the front page, because the Russians and Eastern Europeans are online, and they have an appreciation for assembly like it's poetry, and that's simply an attitude that's hard to find around here in California where your colleagues will look at you like you're green if you're not using the latest new-fangled online framework tool created by the startup next door.

ximeng 5y ago

Unscientific and outdated but there were a couple of polls on locations. In US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583918 Which US state: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5222370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5222370 Worldwide: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582647 https://imgur.com/a/xOAvftj https://imgur.com/a/xOAvftj for charts https://pastebin.com/77KGTfwe https://pastebin.com/77KGTfwe for data