Only 7 + or - 2 websites | Hacker News Reader

Only 7 + or - 2 websites

immadsnewworld.com

41 pointsimmad23 comments

"7 plus or minus two" is one of the most misused and misquoted Psychology research findings ever. It's better to just say "a few" or "a handful" rather than this as it makes it clear you are being approximate, rather than attempting to link your argument back to Miller's classic paper

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/

Agree. See this article discussing the merits of the original 7 +- 2 statement:

http://tastyresearch.com/2006/08/30/debunking-the-seven-plus...

I take your point. However I assume Reid meant "a few" anyway and the 7 +/- 2 was just to frame it. It doesn't really change the meaning of the statement either way.

If I were to deduce a startup strategy from a statistic showing that most people had 7 +/- 2 regularly visited sites, I'd probably take a different approach and reach almost the opposite conclusion.

I'd start by thinking of my typical target audience and why my site would become important enough to be one of the first ten or fewer sites they headed for when they opened their browser. Surely the most logical way to do that is to start up with some firm (but testable) assumptions about something that particular group of people want to do that isn't done well elsewhere. An incipient platform largely devoid of content is about the last place that would make my top ten websites to visit; something that solved a problem well would do even in beta. Being a platform works after people come. Building on the shoulders of platforms is good advice though.

"Amazon - Leads you to other peoples goods"

I think most people go to Amazon to buy from Amazon, not "other people." As opposed to eBay and Craigslist, where the above description is accurate.

No, they go there to buy things. Most of them don't care whether the goods come from Amazon or not, just that they get a good price.

Right. But if we're talking about content, most people go there because of Amazon's content, not other merchants. The vast majority of Amazon's revenue is from their own sales, not merchants'.

I check things out on Amazon not for the savings, but for the reviews. And that's content not created by Amazon. I guess I stick around for the recommendations - but that's also generated by Amazon analysing other people's actions.

Good point re: reviews as motivation to visit their site. Being an ecommerce guy, I was thinking "content" being product data related to products (and delivery/customer service) that Amazon itself actually sells vs. product data (and services) provided by 3rd party merchants (like me).

I'd be interested in seeing the numbers on Amazon customer criteria -- there are plenty of reasons besides price.

Two data points: 1) I recently bought a netbook via Amazon even though it was a new model and Amazon's price was near list and above most other search results -- because of their superior return policy and faster (semi-free) delivery; 2) I recently discovered some backpack clips I liked but declined to buy them at Amazon at $2.16 per clip because a search indicated I could get them for less than half that at REI -- and I would be near an REI outlet that weekend.

In the first case I was sacrificing more than a couple of dollars for speed and improved chances of a satisfactory transaction, in the second the money saved was less relevant than the fact that I'd be near an REI store soon anyway and it's always fun to browse their aisles.

Anyway, I guess my point is that there lots of criteria people use in Amazon visits and their Web usage in general. I visit Hacker News and Amazon "regularly" but it seems foolish to conclude from the frequency of my visits any correlation in my reasons or implied value, even if someone dresses up their SWAG with an allusion to a 1956 psych paper. From an entrepreneurial perspective, I'd be much more interested in contrasting customer usage of Amazon, say, with the Google "shopping" tab. (Amazon does its best to induce browsing of products beyond what brought you to the site -- how successful are they, I wonder?)

I go to Amazon firstly to buy goods from Amazon - but I also consider marketplace sellers.

Amazon has a good level of customer service, and makes a strong effort to keep a positive relationship with its customers. I can't be sure that the smaller sellers will go out of their way to ensure I'm happy.

Why don’t people use the actual ± symbol in the age of Unicode? It’s a quick Google search, or Option-Shift-=, away. The title was inscrutable to me, but 7±2 would have made immediate sense.

I hadn't thought about it. Can't change the HN title now.

Because unicode support still sucks in a lot of ways. The '—' character doesn't display always properly on my Prē, for example.

Really? Under what circumstances? I'm shocked, actually (not a Prē user).

When I viewed a post of mine on HN earlier today with my Prē, the — was replaced with the typical gibberish instead.

Or, in GNOME, it's Compose, +, -.

7+- is a recognizable red herring. There is a better metaphor, but the title led me to think directly of the concept "mentally uploaded".

I visit all of the top ten listed, and twenty or more others pretty regularly, but the idea of a set of web tools makes perfect sense. When web programming for example I am intensely engaged with reference material (php.net/python.org/etc..), multilevel searches (Google/stackoverflow), analytics, hosting, with my surfing ruts, HN and others as a salt.

Similarly an R/C hobbyist might have three manufacturers sites, two forums, and 0-4 parts/sales/events/magazines/other sites depending on the level of involvement they want, but I cant imagine really using more than 10 as an amateur.

For continuous tasks, like programming/work, you need variety but as few mental leaps as possible. To answer a question about function returns takes a different form than a library tutorial for PIL, but will come up in the same context. For occasional but regular things (home, weekends), within a limited activity, you could group together a small number of loosely joined parts that satisfy your interest. With these restrictions 7 seems like a ballpark number.

Hooking up a javascript visited link hack to see what other 7 your users really use could enable you to streamline your service to their habits in some cases.

ya, the regular basis is a bit misleading. I expect regular means daily. There are plenty of sites and traffic serving people on a non-regular basis.

Wikipedia I don't visit daily, and I'd suggest the vast majority of people don't visit it daily. But I visit it when I'm looking for something.

Same with Amazon, IMDB, and a ton of other massive sites.

>most people go to around seven sites +/- 2 on a regular basis

what "regular basis" means? every day, every week?

In the desktop software world it was often cited that in the lifetime of a PC on average only 6 pieces of software are installed.

I wonder if this number is arbitrary, or there is something to it.

I'm not sure I believe it... technical users seem likely to install more apps than that (especially on Windows, where you need to install a bunch of things in order for it to be able to do anything) and every time I see a computer belonging to a "nontechnical" user it's full of little gizmo apps and cruft everywhere.

For every computer with 24 variants of Comet Cursor installed, there have to be three with just the bare OS to counterbalance it. I can imagine being able to use Ubuntu without installing a bunch of extra stuff, but I doubt that's what they were thinking of originally :)

I sometimes will go to which ever site automatically pops up first when I type the first letter.

Eg.

a -> apple.com

b -> my blog's wp-admin login

c -> google.com

and so on.

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