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It's strange to see 1.3m stories and only 5.8m comments. I look forward to examining the data to see how many stories have 0 comments.

• meritt 12y ago
  Lots and lots of stories never make it anywhere near the front page. Mostly spam.
  • nekopa 12y ago
    But I think the spam is caught and doesn't register through the api...
    • minimaxir 12y ago
      Stories which are dead will not show in the API, that's correct. But the proportion of submissions that make it to the front page / get any comments is very low. (<10%)
  • ternaryoperator 12y ago
    "Mostly spam." No. Most stories in "new" get zero comments and are not spam.
  • sytelus 12y ago
    Most stories are not spam, they are just posted at wrong time. To give you an example, this story itself was posted on last Friday evening PST (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7825146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7825146). It got just one upvote and 0 comments. Exact same story with exact same page content on exact same domain was posted on Monday (today) afternoon PST and it got 80+ upvotes, 30+ comments and got on frontpage for more than 6 hours! A lot of stories are like this. HN ranking algorithm isn't perfect.