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Hacker News is 44% 18-24 year olds, 77% male
- quaunaut 14y agoThis honestly makes me pretty curious. I thought the 25-34 range would be larger, especially compared to other sites that seem to have a much less professional atmosphere(Reddit, etc). Hacker News certainly isn't some bastion of intelligent thought and discourse, but it's definitely above average in that, which makes me wonder if the 18-24 year olds are just keeping quiet in the comments, if they're really that smart, or if I'm actually a lot less mature/intelligent than I thought.
- EricDeb 14y agoI am 23.25 and I do generally keep quiet. I would imagine the comments and submissions are generally by the older crowd who have more refined technical knowledge. As far as I can tell, the status quo is to only comment/post if you have expert knowledge on a topic
- sbierwagen 14y agoI'm 23. I just avoid being as flagrant of an asshole here as I am on 4chan.
- sliverstorm 14y ago^ This is an important effect, IMO. I find people will tend to mimic the accepted mode of communication for that channel.
- p4bl0 14y agoI'm 23 too. I'm not on 4chan, but it may be true that I'm a little bit more careful of what I say here than on reddit (depending on the subreddit of course).
- hatu 14y agoIf you don't go to college and can find a good job, there's plenty of professionals in that range. I'm 25 and been programming professionally for 5 years.
- zanny 14y ago20 year old here doing his part to bring the average post quality on HN down to rock bottom!
- EnderMB 14y agoI think it is an accurate portrayal of HN and the results made me think "Yeah, I thought so". HN's issue appears to be that it promotes what younger people view as an aspirational life style. College grads and young techie types will read stories about life at Google, joining startups that become large businesses like Facebook and will think to themselves "Yeah, I want a piece of that!" In reality, HN can be poor for tech discussion and there are some absolutely insane comments on here, to the point where parody accounts like "Shit HN Says" have become very popular. It's an aspirational community with the best intentions, which is fine, but it won't bring the best in business or battle-hardened sysadmins to the table. You're far more likely to see a 22 year old college dropout gushing about how MongoDB is the future than someone that has succeeded in the environment that many people here aspire to join.
- peterwwillis 14y agoMaturity and intelligence don't go hand in hand. Most of my intelligent friends act immature on a regular basis, and most of the older, 'more mature' people I work with don't display any noteworthy level of intelligence. It's also pretty easy for anyone to act politely if they want to. Combine this with the generally accepted notion that a lot of intelligent young people are cocky and egotistical and maturity doesn't have much to do with intelligence at all (IMHO).
- tokenadult 14y agoWhere is the information about the methodology of the survey? The submitted article says the "survey" is based on DoubleClick Ad Planner, https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=branding&passive=1209600&continue=https://www.google.com/adplanner/&followup=https://www.google.com/adplanner/<mpl=adplanner&authuser=0 https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=branding... a Google service, but it's not explained how DoubleClick knows about (for example) users who habitually block cookies and the like, and anyway how does DoubleClick match its data sources with the overall population that uses Hacker News? What is the evidence that the headline figure is anything other than a wild-ass guess?
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- magicalist 14y agoI've never heard of it before, but I did find this: http://support.google.com/adplanner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=175532 http://support.google.com/adplanner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... I'm sure the process is fraught with errors, of course, but there does seem to be data to feed the model and data to serve as a test set. The easy thing about targeting ads with demographic data like this (unlike trying to make statistically-accurate statements about demographic data like this), is that if a person responds to some types of ads like a 45-year-old scuba instructor or whatever, it doesn't matter if they really are any of those things.
- naitbit 14y agoWell lets check result of their methodology with other data. For example for Slashdot. Geeknet provides very different data http://geek.net/our-network/slashdot/ http://geek.net/our-network/slashdot/ Linked article suggest almost 50% in age 35-54 but geeknet stats says it's only 5%. I cannot find it now but someone wrote that about 1/4 or 1/3 of slashdot audience are female which again differs from result in article. I looks like that either US audience is very different from global(although it seems unlikely on US centric site like Slashdot) or methodology of linked article indeed is far from perfect. Obviously I checked only one site from article and there are other possibilities (like geeknet lying or having bad methodology itself), but I would take pingdom report with a big grain of salt.
- dangrossman 14y agoI did my own little analysis of Hacker News readers based on the ~20,000 of you that visited my blog recently: http://www.dangrossman.info/2012/08/21/what-hacker-news-users-use/ http://www.dangrossman.info/2012/08/21/what-hacker-news-user... Of course, I didn't survey people or have access to demographic profiles from other sites, so it's just a breakdown of systems. To summarize, the average HN reader runs Chrome 21 on a pre-Retina MacBook.
- duaneb 14y agoYes, but also remember that you're not measuring HN readers, you're measuring HN readers who thought your link was interesting. There are many (popular) links I don't click.
- MetallicCloud 14y agoWhat I found most disturbing was that most people who visit Hi5 are people in the 25 - 34 age group. That was before I realised it is not a website dedicated to the Australian TV show for small children.
- SlipperySlope 14y agoJust how much of an outlier is a 61 year old male? No pixels on the graph for anyone over 54! Learning new stuff, e.g. writing Android & iOS apps, keeps the mind young, much like lifting weights and aerobics keeps the body young ...
- astrodust 14y agoConsidering the average 60+ year old male still thinks Facebook is about the entire extent of the internet apart from online banking and Amazon, yes. The only 50+ developers are those that have always been developers.
- daeken 14y agoI think that's a silly statement to make. The average 40 year old will have nearly identical patterns, and I assure you that it's not limited to Facebook. While there are certainly more new 20 year old developers than new 60 year old developers, they absolutely do exist; I've met maybe a dozen over the last year or two. (Disclaimer: I'm 24)
- astrodust 14y agoI've met many too, but like I said, most are former developers, or have been developers for some time. They're the ones with war stories about having to load their apps in on paper tape and they're not exaggerating.
- corin_ 14y agoAs a single data point, a colleague of mine is a 50+ developer, who was a nurse in the army until a little over a decade ago - and he learned for the sake of a career change, he didn't move into something that he was already doing on the side, or had done when young.
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- olalonde 14y agoThis poll from a year ago regarding age is probably more representative: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175588 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175588 Results pasted here: Age Points --- ------ 0-10 39 (0.6%) 11-15 32 (0.5%) 16-20 462 (7.5%) 21-25 1620 (26.4%) 26-30 1945 (31.6%) 31-35 1049 (17.1%) 36-40 488 (7.9%) 41-45 269 (4.4%) 46-50 117 (1.9%) 51-55 54 (0.9%) 56-60 35 (0.6%) 61-65 19 (0.3%) 66+ 19 (0.3%) edit: Found a male/female poll here from ~3 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309. Another age poll from ~3 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039 Gender Points ------ ------ Male 1375 (95%) Female 71 (5%)
- dangrossman 14y agoI graphed that data real quick: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chxl=0:|0-10|11-15|16-20|21-25|26-30|31-35|36-40|41-45|46-50|51-55|56-60|61-65|66%2B&chxt=x&chbh=a&chs=600x225&cht=bvg&chco=A2C180&chds=0,1945&chd=t:39,32,462,1620,1945,1049,488,269,117,54,35,19,19&chtt=HN+Age+Survey+Results http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chxl=0:|0-10|11-15|16-20|...
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- sbierwagen 14y ago39 people who are either lying or accidentally clicked on the first option.
- dlokshin 14y agoHow do these compare with the general world population with an internet connection?
- billsix 14y agoDon't care about demographics on HN
- dfc 14y agoHow does doubleclick have demographic data for HN? I would love to be able to see how doublieclick defines me demographically.
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- abrahamsen 14y agoPresuming it is the same as Google Ads: https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/onweb/ https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/onweb/
- rossriley 14y agoThey have tracking cookies installed on most user's machines. This is because they have such a high penetration rate of advertising inventory which they use to profile you by age /sex / interests. Then it's just a case of marking you as an HN user, they do this by detecting the referrer when you arrive at one of their sites.
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- Danski 14y agoWow there's 13% girls on HN?
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- Danski 14y agolol, fail math.
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- cubsink 14y agoWhen it said 23% girls I knew that they based their information on crappy data that isn't representative.
- turingbook 14y agoHard to believe it. Younger than MySpace? And there are so many old people on Facebook?
- shirro 14y agoThat is a depressing statistic.
- zeet2020 14y agoi think the survey result are amazing more and more young people getting interested in tech oriented website. more older people moving towards social networking
- phao 14y ago23% female?!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- pawelwentpawel 14y agoOrkut statistics are quite interesting - most of the people are 24-34, then 35-44 group is relatively small and 45-54 is much bigger. I wonder how accurate this data is.
- justincormack 14y agoGiven that it uses US data and Orkut is not used much in the US, probably not accurate at all. You need the Brazilian stats...
- foidman 14y agoHacker News is 44% 18-24 year olds, 77% male And they hate America and Jesus.
- belorn 14y agoWhats the accuracy of those numbers? In research, statistics are normally followed by a accuracy estimation.
- rdl 14y agoI wonder how different the stats are for casual users (browsing headlines once or twice a month), people who read all the interesting links on the frontpage, those who read comments, those who sometimes comment, and those who routinely comment. I can only thing of a few female commenters. zero on http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders right?
- roguecoder 14y agoThe leaders were probably commenting 3 years ago when the site was, from other stats on this page, 95% male. I see quite a few women who regularly comment: DaniFong, Dove and tessr, off the top of my head. Never mind those that don't mention gender or IRL identity, or have user names that are read as male. "I don't notice any women here" =/= "There are no women here".
- Zenst 14y ago99.99999% of surveys upon social userbase outlets fashion towards 50% of all users being under 24 year's of age. My reasearch for this is based upon a finger in the air and no other hard facts beyond recalling a recent G+ survey. Given this what % of user lie about there age (sexual equality has led males to stay 21 for longer), gender etc. What % keep it private. Do lurkers count and many other details that distract from the reliability % of any result. You never know, maybe in 100 years or so people might look at % based surveys as people most look upon horoscopes today. I would also perhaps argue that any age based grouping in anything other than age itself is ignoring the fact that some people do and can act older or younger than their actual age on many levels. It is perhaps the definition of the areana that the survey is based upon that should be weighted against the user. If somebody had written a program to analyis users posts to guage there age and gender to then come up with some %, then that would of been Hacker News.
- stitchy 14y agoI'm interested in what type of articles the 18-24 year olds submit/read versus other age groups. For instance, I'm in the 25-34 age range, and I almost never care about the JavaScript, CoffeeScript, or other client-side language articles. I tend to read the software methodology, software tool tips/tricks, and gee-wiz-look-how-fast-tech-is-moving articles.
- smackfu 14y agoRemember that any external analytics can only report on viewers, not members.
- brudgers 14y agoAt first I thought this had to be flat out wrong. Then I realized that the typical HN'er probably doesn't post many comments, and even fewer post comments which make me curious enough to look at their profile. What tends to make me look at someone's profile is to see if there is a basis for their opinion in terms of experience. My image of an HN'er probably biased in favor of people who post good insightful comments and not necessarily someone who still just clicks on links.
- oenoneNY 14y agoWait wait wait. I (along with every single other female programmer I know) show up as a male on google's Ad Planner. If the only category they give you is "Computers & Hardware", then you are assumed to be a man. Of course it is going to think most of hacker news is male.
- razdjp 14y agoThat explains a lot.
- lothie 14y agoSo utterly against the stream...heh
- pixelbath 14y agoI find it interesting that DoubleClick (Google) claims to have accurate data about HN's demographics when HN doesn't use ads or the DoubleClick network. I've seen a few people mention "tracking cookies" that DoubleClick leaves on your machine. Without something on a HN page serving content from an ad network page, cookies won't work that way.