← Back to context

Comment by yreg

3 years ago

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

10 comments

yreg

Reply
dawidpotocki  3 years ago

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

capableweb  3 years ago

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.

  • yreg  3 years ago

    Source on the millions?

    This person says they got 12k visitors over a day:

    https://nicklafferty.com/blog/what-happens-when-you-re-on-th...

    The websites hugged to death by this forum are usually tiny hobby projects.

    • sc90  3 years ago

      Hacker News has 3.4 million users per month and 350,000 users per day, with 4 million pageviews a day. There are just under 1 million registered accounts, with several hundred added each day. Users post around 1,000 articles and 6,000 comments to the site per day. https://blog.samaltman.com/2017-yc-annual-letter

    • michaelsalim  3 years ago

      Not the OP but they were referring to the whole site. So definitely not millions, but the number is probably higher than you think.

      From the blog you linked, the number of interest is 18k. 12k are only those with HN referrer headers. In reality, many setup strips that header so you can't track it exactly right. The author did mention they averaged 50 views before.

      A big part of it are reposts. From my own submissions, posting to HN resulted in tons of different origins. Public ones like reddit, twitter and private ones like newsletters, dashboard & chat messages. You'll also be surprised by the wide variety of clients people use to access HN.

      They also used Google analytics to track the numbers. Most people in HN block it either through the browser or an extension [0]. In reality it's probably double the traffic.

      Don't forget to account for scraping & crawling bots. That's another big source of traffic that the author didn't track.

      [0] https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-adblockers-missin...

Aeolun  3 years ago

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?

dicknuckle  3 years ago

Indeed there are. Tens of us!

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

  • michaelsalim  3 years ago

    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.