Have you looked at number of comments instead of number of submissions? That would seem to be a better estimator of user growth. Honestly, I don't think that e

Have you looked at number of comments instead of number of submissions? That would seem to be a better estimator of user growth. Honestly, I don't think that estimating number of submissions is a very good metric for the growth of Reddit (or Hackernews). If you want some proxy for its influence, you care about readership more than anything else. This thread [1] on Reddit (and the references therein) shows that 50% of Reddit activity comes from users that aren't even logged in. So even if you were just able to measure logged in users (which would still be a far greater number than submissions), you would still only estimate half the influence. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1khp85/logged_out_users_account_for_50_of_reddits_traffic/ http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1khp85/logge...