Ask HN: 25% of the most popular HN stories were posted in the last 9 days | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: 25% of the most popular HN stories were posted in the last 9 days

57 pointsvaline10 comments

5 of the 20 all time most popular HN stories were posted in the last 9 days. Has the HN readership grown dramatically in the past couple weeks or this just an anomaly?

Top 20 HN posts of all time:

  https://hn.algolia.com/?q=&query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story

The five posts in question:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707547
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747414
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13755673

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You missed the sha-1 collision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713480

Besides the two Uber stories, it's simply that a large number of incredible events have happened recently. If you'd have told me about the sha-1 collision, Cloudbleed, S3 going down, or the seven exoplanets, I'd have predicted 1K+ votes for any of them, simply because they're very newsworthy, relevant, and super interesting to HN readers.

The two Uber stories hit a nerve in a hot topic, adding a lot of specifics to formerly vague concerns/accusations. If you'd have shown me the stories before they were posted, I would have predicted "front page, probably in the 200-400 range", rather than the 2K+ votes they each got. Either they were very lucky, or (more likely) my model doesn't account for that particular type of story.

I'd say the uber story is more interesting and relevant to most readers because it feels like a travesty that could happen to any of us

To some extent, in most cases a smaller extent, it is a narrative we have all witnessed in the workplace.

The past week and a half has had some pretty incredible postings. Uber has dug itself into an epic PR hole from the taxi strike to stepping down from Trump's advisory panel to revealations that their office resembles Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Then you have a SHA-1 collision AND Cloudbleed on the same day.

My personal favorite of these is the NASA discovery of 7 earth-like planets in the goldilocks zone of a red dwarf. The little kid in me is imagining Tattoine with a binary star system AND 3 or 4 garden planets that would appear as large as our moon. A lot of them are within .005-.008AU of each other. For reference, the moon is ~.00e AU away (closer, but smaller).

AND SpaceX announced that they would be flying 2 private citizens to the moon. I'm surprised that isn't in the top ten. Maybe HN is fatigued

Yeah, last two weeks were insane, so many seemingly important events in a batch.

I guess some algorithm might have changed, because it's really odd to see that a thread like this one about S3 has already gained 2.5k votes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13755673. I don't remember seeing that amount of votes to threads like this during the past year.

Could it be some fallout of the story[0] posted on reddit 11 days ago in regards to the shilling? I know that personally that has increased my time spent on HN.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5une6u/reddit_is_be...

It's both.

This has less to do with the popularity of the post itself, and more to do with the overall success of the HN community, and possibly the growth of the userbase over time.

I fear: somebody wrote an upvote-bot.

Great time to be a hacker news reader, so many interesting topics to discuss.

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