8 ms·
News.YC Growth
- robg 18y agoIn the Just Curious Dept: Can you provide the number of user accounts? Have the number of posts also increased 12x fold? The turnover on the new page seems more like 3-5x from what it used to be.
- robg 18y agoAlso, any idea what those two huge spikes are at the beginning of August and, especially, the middle of September?
- Xichekolas 18y agoThe one in the middle of September was the beginning of Eternal... (Sorry, that was too hard to pass up.)
- pg 18y agoSpikes in page views are usually misbehaving crawlers.
- parenthesis 18y agoSee here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379932 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379932
- robg 18y agoCool, thanks. (The number of users 9 days ago from pg: 12385) Anyone know the number of daily posted links? Comments? Now versus six months and/or a year ago?
- dcurtis 18y agoThis is sort of related to the traffic here: a snapshot of my Google Analytics after having a link on the front page for about three days. http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/ga.jpg http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/ga.jpg (This is the post, for reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388510 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388510 )
- matt1 18y agoOff-topic: Kudos on the novel blog design. It's especially interesting how each of your three posts uses a different layout. The third one -- the black and red one -- leads me to believe you're either insane or insanely creative. Anyway, nice job, keep them coming.
- fallentimes 18y agoHe's definitely both.
- mcdowall 18y agoYour 404 page did make me chuckle.. http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/ http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/ "yeah no"
- lpgauth 18y agoWould be cool to know what the big spikes on the graphs represent.
- petercooper 18y agoOther interesting data: http://top.searchyc.com/ http://top.searchyc.com/
- Alex3917 18y agoIt's worth noting that most of the top submissions are actually really good, whereas on Reddit none of the top submissions are even remotely good.
- anthonyrubin 18y agoComparing the main reddit to HN is hardly fair. There are, for instance: http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/ http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/
- SingAlong 18y agoYou are right! Some submissions are the same. And all submissions have the quality there too.
- run4yourlives 18y agoThere was a time when reddit was very good. But then the noise came and it was game over.
- petercooper 18y agoI know it's the alarmist thing to say, but it's starting here. While there have been flurries of "poor" content accruing a decent set of points in the past, I'm now starting to see a lot of downvoting occurring. Previously, downvotes were used on spam, offensiveness, or flat out "wrong" comments - whereas now it appears to be an indicator of opinion. This shift demonstrates how significant the "new wave" of HN users is.
- 18y ago
- volida 18y agothe graph doesnt show any signs that the growth will slow down, rather the contrary.
- jmtame 18y ago"Growth can't keep going at this rate forever without ruining the site, though. Between those two alternatives, we prefer growth to slow down." I actually agree with you on this, and I wasn't going to say anything, but I've been a little discouraged by some of the stuff I've seen up-voted lately. I think Hacker News is a special place and hope to protect the community that we've built here.
- notdarkyet 18y agoI personally don't see the content of the articles degrading as much as the comments. If anything there seems to be more movement and moderation of the articles which mostly is an improvement. The thing that I notice is the depth and quality of the comments. It took me a while to build up enough confidence to go from a lurker to a member and actually make comments. It was nice to feel that sense of pressure to make a quality comment that actually adds to the conversation rather than simply take up space or repeat what another person has said so that I can make my post. The moment a social news site begins to degrade in my opinion is when comments are posted that add little or nothing to advancing or starting conversation (for example "Modded up for _______", "Really Nice _____" or my favorite "When I read the title of this post I thought it said ___. I have had too much ________ today") There was a period where it felt as though the same articles would sit on the front page all day. The increase in the gravity for old posts and the increase in total number of posts has caused me (and I would assume others) to become more active in the site. I think the focus in moderation should be on the comments to set an example for what is expected.
- pg 18y agoYeah, it's true, comments probably have suffered a bit. It might be possible to do something about this. Maybe I could use a statistical filter to auto-detect potentially vapid comments and ask the submitters if they're sure they want to post them.
- jmtame 18y agoI was originally referring to stories, although for the stories that I disagree with, I'll get a massive karma beat down. So I guess it's more of a personal thing for me. Maybe an informal etiquette reminder displayed with a "confirmation" for potentially bad comments. The downvote never hurts either.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- Shamiq 18y agoI get this strange feeling that I may represent a third of all daily hits. Perhaps I spend too much time here. Something about the company of intelligent individuals...
- edw519 18y agoI imagine we all have this issue from time to time. Is it because the experience here is so good, or... Is something in your work "missing" so much that your passion pulls you here instead. hn is great, but if it "attracts" you more than your project, then it's time to take a good hard look at your project.
- HeyLaughingBoy 18y agoIt's the community. I will most likely never release a webapp (I'm an embedded kinda guy), but I like seeing what others are doing and reading about their insights and experiences. It's one of the few places I can find a group of smart people doing something I find interesting.
- uuilly 18y agomeretricious |merəˈtri sh əs| adjective 1 apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity : meretricious souvenirs for the tourist trade. 2 archaic of, relating to, or characteristic of a prostitute.
- mattmaroon 18y agoThe word 'meretricious' has always irked me because if you didn't know what it meant you might mistake it for a positive one. Way off-topic I know.
- tsally 18y agoI have a query for the userbase: how much do you think the quality of this site would go down is URLs from Techcrunch were banned? I suggest that it wouldn't be very much :-).
- pchristensen 18y agoTC reviews of startups are the most reliable, in the sense that a) there will always be one (TC is thorough) and b) the quality and viewpoint is fairly consistent so they're more valuable because you know the bias, as opposed to a review from some random site.
- tsally 18y agoSomehow I don't accept consistent bias as an acceptable aspect of a review, or any journalism piece for that matter.
- whatusername 18y agoThis is the internet. Surely something with a consistent bias is the lesser evil compared to an unknown bias.
- davidw 18y ago"we'll simply run out of new people the site appeals to." That means eliminating politics stories, because those: * Appeal to pretty much anyone with an opinion, including lots of non-hacker types. * Really suck people in. "Someone is wrong on the internet!" Look at how many comments there were on the Obama/Broadband story. Were any of them really that interesting? I would expect the hacker mind (at least those who are not devout followers of the 'keep the government out of it' school) to have already arrived at the fact that it's some sort of monopoly/oligopoly situation and to cast about for research on what sorts of policy approaches might cause what effects, and have what sort of consequences, both positive and negative. One minute with Google scholar turns up this, for instance: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119176828/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119176828/abstrac... Most likely, someone who actually knows something about economics might be able to point to others of interest. But that takes a lot more effort than the simple sorts of debate that tend to surround those stories.
- quantumhobbit 18y agoThe degradation of quality posts/comments is inevitable as news.yc or any social news site grows. The only thing saving new.yc is the limited appeal of the subject matter. This is like moving from a small town to a big city. Someone can be rude to another person in a big city because more than likely they will never meet a again. In a small town everyone knows everyone else and word spreads rapidly. You don't want to act like an ass in a small town because everyone will hear about it. In large online communities, karma is supposed to act as an incentive to be nice and contribute thoughtfully, but it is not as effective as true reputation among people that you know personally. What the world as a whole thinks of you is less powerful than what your friends think of you. A good experiment would be to enforce the small town effect on an online community. Partition a news site into groups of 100-1000 members. Comments and submissions would only be visible inside each members subgroup until upvoted past a certain threshold. With luck members would get to know one another inside a group and desire each others respect enough to contribute to the discussion meaningfully. Debates would last for days or weeks instead of an afternoon as is the case on current news sites. Trolls damage would be confined to one group at time as well.
- Retric 18y agoThat sounds like a really interesting idea, why don't you build it? A few months ago I had an idea for automatically forcing people to submit story's to sub groups as the sight grows. So it starts as a base line then it's a Funny, then it's Funny, picture then it's Funny, picture, cat etc. And at each level people can automatically weigh how much they like each sub group. Then set the homepage as the average weight people give each sub group. Then redit started adding sub redits and I realized it was an easy idea to copy.
- quantumhobbit 18y agoI might just try to build it. I don't have too much experience with web development, but I have some time off for Christmas and that would be a great way to learn. It sounds like you have spent some time thinking about news sites. Do you have any recommendations for language/framework/existing open source code?
- Fuca 18y ago18,000? I thought this was about 100,000
- fiaz 18y agocompete.com is way off: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.ycombinator.com/?metric=uv http://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.ycombinator.com/?metri...
- ErrantX 18y agoJust as a comment. I barely ever read the front page. I check the "new" page once every couple of hrs (and read/post al that). The wealth of information is great.. the front page has.. well.. loses it's interest after a couple of hrs of the day..
- zitterbewegung 18y agoSo PG's conjecture is there is a equilibrium point of appeal for people part of this site?