HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
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Note: I work on Woopra projects :-)
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Delicious did in the BILLIONS of monthly PVs when I left - I really doubt HN throws more traffic in aggregate.
HN gets about 60k unique visitors on weekdays. We used to have about 750k pageviews on weekdays, but I just cracked down on crawlers that were killing performance, and the number is closer to 650k now. I've heard from several people that HN is a source of referral traffic out of proportion to its size, presumably because its concentration means more articles are interesting to more readers. But it would have to be a traffic source way out of proportion to its size to get the kind of numbers they're quoting in this study.
That's attributable to the fact that I'm active in this community, so I was surprised to see it accounting for so much traffic on a larger sample, but there's certainly evidence that even links that get no votes and no comments still drive traffic (though not as much as links that add value and create discussion).
Look at the numbers, HN is a top 3,000 site, reddit is a top 300 site.
A huge chunk of reddit links are back to reddit, to imgur and to things like major newspapers and youtube. If only a few of these are not actually tracked by Woopra, the results would get skewed significantly.
Top-level front-page reddit is pushing 100k.
Here's an example of the traffic of a recent article that got both HN and proggit: http://imgur.com/TpQ5T Obviously, n=1 here, but this pattern repeats all the time.
I mean, how is it useful as bookmarks, social or otherwise? Are you able to save something so you can return to it later?
There are lots of bookmark lets that have nothing to do with bookmarking. It's just a way to execute some JavaScript in the context of a page.
Most of the sites there aren't social bookmarking, either. SU has the functionality, though.
For what it's worth, I'm the one who coined the term.
So, yes, you can return to those pages at a later point in time.
Again, in what way can you use this site as your bookmarks? You save an obscure documentation page and a mod deletes it, and then what?
HN (like digg, reddit, etc) is social news, or something. People who confuse the two think so because the delicious front page and digg looked similar, or whatever.
The bigger risk for deletions seems to be not tech related stuff but rather non-tech related stuff that manages to get a couple of upvotes.
HN is social news simply because the audience can define it as such.
The main ingredients, the ability to post links and to discuss them and to revisit them at a later stage makes it such that some users will come by and use it in that way.
All the stuff you submit and upvote goes on that list, you can't remove stuff from the list if you've upvoted it, you can't remove stuff from the list after a certain time has passed.
Like I said, it's a forum.
As the coiner of the term, you may want to update the wikipedia article which, after listing the basic requirements says: "As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks".
So there seems to be a convergence of terms and services here.
I think the major difference between social bookmarking sites (of which I see HN as one, and you obviously don't) versus a forum is that on a forum the vast majority of the topics is not started with a link.
On HN the vast majority of the topics is started with a link.
The confusion stems from when Kevin Rose started calling Digg social bookmarking to help raise VC, and was adopted by people who are only understanding superficially (the front pages look kinda similar, so clearly they're the same thing!) Kevin then stopped using the term.
I think you either understand this superficially as well. There are many things that I could use to serve some obscure purpose without that being the primary purpose.
Or perhaps you are just trolling.
I understand that initially the definition was a more narrow one, but since this seems to be the way people use it nowadays I'll just go with the flow, I have no vested interest in seeing the definition being used in one way or another.
To me a 'forum' is a site where people will come to discuss a subject, occasionally using links to illustrate the point.
I think that it is not very friendly to try to label someone that is having a fairly long conversation with you a troll just because you apparently disagree with them.
I do not think that "it has links to start discussions" make it a social bookmarking site. I think it is bookmarking + public that make it a social bookmarking site.
HN is a forum and a social news site. Delicious is social bookmarking and maybe a weak social news site, but not a forum.
Slashdot, also mentioned in the article, is DEFINITELY not a social bookmarking site. Surely you agree with this?
Incidentally, I picked a random forum, and looked at a few items. They all seemed to be started around links: http://www.r8talk.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=fa7531fdc42e...
I know that I personally hardly read it anymore, but I used to read it many times per day.
So it doesn't drive as much traffic as you might expect, but when your site does get mentioned on /. it gets much more traffic than a HN posting.
Also, there probably is very little overlap between the typical /. covered site and the sites that woopra covers, /. is not really a start-up related site.
If you were to re-run the numbers with all of google analytics covered sites (impossible to get the data, unfortunately) you'd likely get a different picture.
The barrier to entry for a successful HN posting is much lower than it is on /., the volume of 'posted' stories on /. is much lower too.
All in all less surprising than you'd think at first sight.
Regarding the seeming discrepancy in data for Google's share, the reasons are probably: (i) more of Bing/Yahoo's traffic stays within their portals than Google's does, and (ii) Google is especially dominant among tech-savvy users, and the websites that were analyzed have proportionally more of such users (which would also explain why HN shows up).