Comment by jszymborski

3 years ago

This post is on the front of HN. Many a larger website have succumbed to HN's warm embrace.

Isn't HN pretty small? This post has <400 upvotes over 3 hours. There can't be 1000x that amount of lurkers can there?

  • I can provide some statistics myself.

    One of my blog posts was submitted to HN that had 194 points and 149 comments[1]. All dates are in UTC.

      1 - Unique visitors per day - Including spiders
      Hits       h%  Vis.     v%  Tx. Amount Data
      ------ ------ ----- ------ ----------- ----
       14439  1.49%  1148  1.19%  106.42 MiB 21/Jan/2023
       17043  1.75%  1754  1.81%  184.69 MiB 20/Jan/2023
       33560  3.45%  3267  3.37%  491.32 MiB 19/Jan/2023
       46568  4.79%  5816  6.01%  637.54 MiB 18/Jan/2023
      323797 33.32% 28928 29.88%    4.06 GiB 17/Jan/2023  <- Resubmitted on HN and websites started copy-pasting the article from the big website with the same mistakes, never checking my post which had a note about these mistakes :)
       24330  2.50%  3341  3.45%  360.48 MiB 16/Jan/2023  <- Put in a second-chance pool by a moderator and an article with a lot of mistakes published by some big website
       17074  1.76%  3348  3.46%  243.44 MiB 15/Jan/2023  <- Published on HN
        1041  0.11%   120  0.12%    3.70 MiB 14/Jan/2023
        1666  0.17%   171  0.18%    8.40 MiB 13/Jan/2023  <- Post published
         991  0.10%   123  0.13%  374.78 KiB 12/Jan/2023
    
      2 - Requested Files (URLs)
      Hits      h%  Vis.     v%  Tx. Amount Mtd      Proto    Data
      ----- ------ ----- ------ ----------- -------- -------- ----
      57604  5.93% 31427 32.46%  260.97 MiB GET      HTTP/2   /en/2023/01/13/msi-insecure-boot/
      31179  3.21% 11263 11.63%  245.20 MiB GET      HTTP/1.1 /en/2023/01/13/msi-insecure-boot/
    
      11 - Referring Sites (depends on Referer header, not very accurate for reasons)
      Hits       h%  Vis.     v% Tx. Amount Data
      ------ ------ ----- ------ ---------- ----
      446781 45.97% 29686 30.66%   5.95 GiB dawidpotocki.com
       14834  1.53%  9485  9.80%  79.85 MiB news.ycombinator.com
      (news sites with very low hundreds or even under, nobody checks sources)
    

    [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34388533

  • HN has millions of page views per day (maybe @dang can give a more accurate and updated number), and things frequently gets reposted elsewhere. Happens many times that things on the frontpage gets brought down to its knees, this wouldn't be the first nor the last.

  • I’ve seen other people that posted about the HN embrace talk about 50k extra visitors. I guess this is a single page, so 50k pageviews?

  • Indeed there are. Tens of us!

    Maybe you underestimate how many people want to keep up on things but not interact?

    • More than tens I'd say. I suspect for each person that interacts, there are dozens that don't. If I have to bet, I'd put the ratio at 1:100. So 100 lukers for every 1 active user.