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A couple of observations, for what they're worth. "Tell them you're only 17!" If you do, you'll only self-identify as one of them. Average age is high teens t
by DanielBMarkham 14y ago
A couple of observations, for what they're worth.
"Tell them you're only 17!"
If you do, you'll only self-identify as one of them. Average age is high teens to low 20s, if I remember correctly.
"People seemed to have a problem with everything."
To me this is the result of a large number of people participating. It makes the commenting system rather challenging. Basically anything that can be misinterpreted will be misinterpreted. Sometimes it's so bad I wonder if people aren't being purposefully idiotic, just to score some karma.
From reading your article, I imagine you found the attention worthwhile, though frustrating. Welcome to the club. In a strange way it's very seductive to have 10K fellow hackers come by and look at your work, even if they do miss the point, wander off on tangents, and generally posture for each other. Just be careful you're not subtly sucked into writing just for the HN crowd, unless you have an idea you want to sell to a lot of nerds.
- talkingquickly 14y agoI'd be genuinely curious where the average age numbers come from? From a point of zero objective information I'd have guess the average age to be mid to late twenties...
- DanielBMarkham 14y agoWe've polled this at least twice that I remember. In addition, I did a poll on caffeine and age among HNers a year or two ago (dig, dig) Here it is: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/09/hackers-and-caf.php http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/09/hackers-and-c... My poll showed mid-20s, but that was 3.5 years ago. If I remember correctly, polls show the age continuing to drop as more folks join. This isn't much of an argument, but if you think about it, people most likely to be on HN are people who are not doing anything useful besides consuming stuff. That group should trend heavily towards the younger and unemployed. As total numbers rise, total number of young people who are actively consuming HN at any one time should rise disproportionately, no?
- talkingquickly 14y agoMakes sense the most active users would be the one's with the most free time (the younger and unemployed). Unless of course there are many people - such as myself - who consider Hacker News a fairly useful learning resource and so contribute (albeit not very often) despite having a lot of other things to do? I'd be very interested to see how the average age of the submitters of "useful" content - e.g. posts which rate highly (ok a very tenuous definition of useful) and content heavy comments - compares to the overall average.
- sesqu 14y agoIt'd worth noting that the average registered user is quite a different thing from the average commenter. It's also worth noting that in many cases, age is a variable with high deviation.