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That's one of the more interesting patterns in HN's history because it changed noticeably at the beginning of 2012. Before that it was growing rapidly, but then it declined and since then has been fluctuating. It's currently about where it was at the end of 2011: https://imgur.com/a/F7BC7TE. Meanwhile the number of comments is more than twice what it was then.

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But the userbase grew a lot, didn't it? I guess that'd explain the effect pretty straightforwardly.

The userbase grew a lot since 2012. You'd expect that to lead to proportionally more submissions (as it did more comments), but the number of submissions has stayed about the same. Bit of a puzzle, no?

My theory is that it's because there's a limited supply of good-for-HN articles out there. But really we don't know. Also, those numbers are raw total submissions, with no attempt to control for dupes.

"early-adopters" are more active users than the users coming a bit later?

Why would a new user post anything? Correct or not, I don't think one would expect their submissions to be picked up. For those who do there is always?:

https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

Is that the christmas week dipping every year?

Yes.

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