Annotated Hacker News traffic since the beginning | Hacker News Reader

Annotated Hacker News traffic since the beginning

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Here's a non-dropbox link https://i.imgur.com/uicVRpb.png

This is really off topic, but wow I think imgur is finally unusable on mobile.

I just spend the last couple minutes trying to view that picture and had nothing but issues.

It first opened in the imgur app, but there it only showed a zoomed out preview which I can't just zoom in on, I need to click to open it again larger but then it wouldn't let me zoom past a given point. So I uninstalled the app, re opened the link and it loaded in their web UI, which had the same issue as the mobile (can't zoom enough). I then long pressed the image, opened it in a new tab, had to modify the URL to remove the "fidelity=medium" in the URL, and I could finally view the image in my browser and zoom in on it...

Same here. How did they bungle something so simple?

Yea, why not a URL right to the raw image? That technology existed for decades. Image search site results are the same thing: I just want the raw image URL! How could that be so hard?

They don't want people linking directly to the images, they want people linking to the app. They made it difficult to do otherwise on purpose.

If they want people to use their app they should make the app good then so we don't need external links.

One of the nice things about DuckDuckGo vs Google images is they actually link directly to the image when you click on the image part.

There’s a chrome extension to revert Google images to the old behavior. If you can get over the name (Make Google Images Great Again) it’s a really nice and small widget.

Thanks, installed it. I don't care about the name if it does what it says.

Open direct link to 1 image but actually download dozens more, way to kill data plan.

I understand they need some ads, but even then it's really easy. The unnecessary ajax-loading and overcomplicated interface did it in. Why is ajax so bad on mobile anyway? Like how the new mobile reddit takes 30 seconds to load on my phone.

> Image search site results are the same thing: I just want the raw image URL!

For what it's worth, Google removed direct links to images as part of a settlement.

https://9to5google.com/2018/02/09/google-images-features-get...

Because they can't make money off of direct image linking. Monetization is where all the image hosting platforms ended up going bad. Imgur is not too bad but they've added a few features that just make it harder. On desktop, I'm glad you can still just right-click and copy image URL.

Desktop mode fixes imgur on mobile. Unfortunately, that seems to be the only way to do it without manually editing the URL.

I don't even try to open imgur links on mobile anymore. For the past month or so, it doesn't even load, I get a black screen. And I refuse to install their app in order to use a website. Same with reddit and Twitter.

Maybe I'm an exception, but smartphones always had terrible usability for me.

This made me realize that HN predates the iPhone... The early comments make for an interesting read: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=iphone&sort=byPopularity&prefi...

All the comments were so negative (not buying iPhone, selling AAPL stock, Apple will sell less than 10 million iPhones). It's interesting how many people missed the importance of iPhone to the company and to the world.

It looks like there's a beat frequency. The traffic goes up and down weekly, and probably there's less traffic on the weekends (yay! HN gets out on the weekends). But it seems like there are 6 months cycles as well. I wonder why, and what an FFT of this time series looks like, or what a sliding window of the FFT looks like.

Or maybe HN is a huge time sink for us procrastinators during the week :)

I'm looking at the labels and quickly realizing that I don't have a clue when I first started reading Hacker News. I kept going back and forth finding stories that I remember reading and important stories that I completely missed.

I thought that I had only recently made an account only to realize that I had made this account 4 years ago. I suppose the effect is amplified since HN hasn't had any distinct "eras", be them in design, site rules or community.

In my mind HN history is split between “with pg” and “without pg,” as he stopped commenting several years ago.

https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac...

I can't seem to zoom in far enough on my phone to read the labels. What are those two events where traffic spikes tremendously?

The first spike is annotated with "Changes in HN logging system".

The second is annotated with "Bot activity: combated with some HN/YC software".

You'll need to save the image in order to get it in full size. Sorry there's no other way around this.

You can also follow the link, go to Dropbox web and select direct download from the top right dots menu. That gives you a version that is fully zoomable.

I just visited the Dropbox link on my phone, long press on the image -> open in new tab. It opened the full resolution image with the ability to zoom and pan at will.

Biggest spike:

"Diffie and Hellman win Turing award"

Second biggest right before:

"Stripe Atlas"

"Microsoft acquires Xamarin"

"Apple / FBI dispute"

Much as I'd like to believe that a Turing Award could triple HN's traffic, it was bots.

That's noted in the graphic, but closer to the X-axis rather than at the top of the spikes.

The graph shows that as HN traffic has grown, traffic swings have become even larger. This means that the majority of HN growth has been strongly in one-time zone. Another observation is that traffic swings have very sharp peaks which means HN ranking algorithms need to be extraordinarily robust to not depend on the availability of huge traffic. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case as you can see stories that get ranked on top are pretty much random. I think we would be shocked to see qualities of stories that got ranked on the bottom of these daily traffic cycles. I'd say HN is a very nice challenging research problem for collaborative filtering with highly fluctuating traffic.

It's really interesting to see how many times Stripe announcements have caused huge spikes in traffic for HN

Not sure if it's a direct causal relationship. dang can better tell.

The graph in this case ended up being just a base layer for some interesting internet stories, while paying some tribute to HN for the great place it is.

The data looks a bit like its time resolution is too limited to resolve all the peaks properly. There are some uncharacteristically slow weeks that almost seem like their peaks just fell between two data points.

Dropbox is blocked for me. What is that big spike in the middle of the graph? The Twitter thumbnail is illegible. Thanks.

Here's one on G Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NJ9bio4gz8AJ7RTmYGDKXiWJLCm...

Let me know if this works for you

Sorry for my ignorance, but is he working on HN? It's confusing because he wrote that he has no affiliation with YC.

Nope. It's clarified in later tweets how the graph was built.

Thanks, Twitter threads are part of the worst hacks ever.

Why do you think so?

Well, clearly not an exponential growth.

But also HN is clearly not a startup and probably hasn't spent a cent on marketing.

In fact, as far as I've learned, a lot of the work here involves stopping bad actors/users rather than finding ways to get users.

No, that would be a disaster. We would be like Samuel Beckett's wife when she heard he'd got the Nobel Prize: "Quelle catastrophe".

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/03/22/beckett-storming...

I came here to say basically the same thing. The flat but slight growth to me, speaks to the health of the community. Its not like high quality "hackers"/etc are as a population growing exponentially.

I can't read the Y axis values so I can't tell.

Log-log and a fat marker, perhaps

How come? It's quite clear. Did you try downloading the image? It's a relatively big one

I notice the iPhone SE, the phone Apple stubbornly refuses to update, is the single most traffic-generating phone ever discussed here on HN, even at its announcement.

Maybe that’s just me, but you know, I would assume that means something.

So eh, Apple? You guys listening?

That coincides with a note that says "bot activity". Not sure how much of that spike you can actually attribute to the iPhone SE.

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