Poll: How often do you visit HN? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: How often do you visit HN?

118 pointssolipsist78 comments

I just wanted to see how addicted we really are to Hacker News.

Am I the only person that doesn't really think that 10 times is that much? It wouldn't surprise me if I check it more than 30 times on days that I check it a lot.

Wake up and lay in bed for a few minutes...check HN.

Waiting in line for coffee or something? Check HN...

On hold on the phone? Check HN...

Load HN on my computer and maybe skim an article or something...

and so on.

I think that the confusion might be coming from how some of us check HN. I'm actually reading an article only very rarely, and only commenting even more rarely. Usually it's just a quick skim of the headlines to see if anything interesting is happening in the world.

How many times do some of you glance out the window when you're sitting at your desk? More than 10?

Maybe a better analogy is: how many times do you glance at the clock? The clock is meaningless to your work, it's just a status update about your surroundings. Same thing, at least to me, about HN. It isn't about actually reading anything, it's just about getting a quick status update about what's going on.

I'd bet that >70% of my visits to HN are less than a minute long.

Yes, I contemplated using the amount of time users spent on HN rather than the number of sessions in this poll. However, the former is probably harder for users to estimate.

Maybe there should be a question: How long is your typical visit to HN? to complement this one.

Poll Added: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2091261

The data here is likely going to be biased towards the people who actually DO check HN all the time even if there are more of the once in a while folks unless you factor in the likelihood each group in seeing this poll before it gets buried.

I wonder if there's some statistical technique you could use to correct for this..

Not placing the poll on HN will help a little... ;)

1.) Need a random sample 2.) Need large enough sample size

I guess placing the poll on another popular site (not in the same genre as HN, preferably) would help

Oh, but doesn't that mean you're measuring Hacker News to another popular site?

And the link would immediately be posted and upvoted on HN, nullifying the effort.

Figure out how long the poll stays on the home page. For each group, scale that group's number up by the reciprocal of the probability of a person seeing the poll conditional on their membership in that group. (This conditional probability will be equal to min(the amount of time the poll stays on the home page divided by the average length between visits for a member of that group, 1).)

This assumes a person's visits are evenly distributed with time, and that members of all groups are equally likely to respond to the poll if they see it.

Probably less frequent visitors are less likely to have registered accounts and therefore less likely to respond to the poll if they see it.

Here's quick correction: Toss out the poll look in the server log. (Requires access to server log)

It needs an option for "Way too much." Unless that's meant to be covered by 10+ times a day. It's time well spent though.

not necessarily--i typically click on at least one link every time, but if i only check it once every evening, i don't waste time on garbage links, and the comments are already mature

I don't see how HN 10 times a day could be considered time well spent. That's a LOT of interruptions.

[disclosure: I picked 5-10 times a day]

You could set it as your browsers home page.

I mean mine is set to Google, but I could always just use the search bar.

It would be a lot if everytime you are reading articles and comments, I can say I probably check hacker news more than 10 times and most of the time it is just skimming for articles that sound interesting to me, usually I only end up reading a few articles/comment threads a day.

Tell me about it. Was on a date last Friday and couldn't resist checking it when my lady friend checked her phone for the time. I showed her what I was reading and she was floored. Her attitude became far more amiable since she believed I was going to be the next Julian Assange. Thank you pg!

P.S. As a kid, I always dreamed of a secret online community where the world's smartest people gathered to discuss highly relevant and interesting subjects. When I saw Eliezer Yudkowsky reply to a post by Paul Buchheit, I knew I had found the promised land.

P.P.S. We need a poll that asks how many of us quit our jobs due to pg's work and/or HN. You'd have at least one vote from me :)

A good poll may be is what your doing with your life right now in a large way influenced by you frequenting HN?

The number and rate at which people are choosing 10+ is almost frightening. However, it's definitely predictable - as well as comforting to know that we are not alone.

jasonshen brings up a good point by saying that the data will be biased towards the people who check HN more often. This is true and, while I don't expect this to be a formal, or even accurate, poll in any way whatsoever, it seems as if it has reached the front page - which may help. For example, if this stays there a little longer, we'll have a better idea of the number of people who check 10+ times a day in comparison to those who check 1-5.

Eschewing the usefulness of rss and similar solutions, the endless articles on productivity and discipline, and ultimately all good sense, I find myself visiting hacker news more times per day than a productive person would/should... and it looks like perhaps i'm not alone

10+ times a day? That seems an awful lot!

~8:20 am: Check HN on iPhone while getting ready for work. Make mental note of top stories.

9:00 am: Load HN in a tab at work

12:00 pm: Check HN before leaving for lunch. Usually a quick peruse as I finish up my tasks before my coworkers and I head out. Again, I take a mental note of the top stories of the day.

12:45 pm: Now that I'm back from lunch, I will read a few of the stories, sometimes leave a comment or two, before delving into my afternoon projects.

5:30 pm: Home from work! Time to check HN (and Reddit, etc).

So I guess that's five times per day, during the workday. When I get home, I easily refresh another five times.

But, hey, that must be awesome for pg's analytics, right?!

Too often, I really should focus more on doing stuff rather than reading about others doing their stuff.

Knowing that I can't do it all, I like to read about the rest.

I always wished the decay with time was normalized by the number of visits someone makes per day. That way, when someone visits frequently, they're often see more stuff, but if someone only visits once a week, they'll see the highest rated stuff over the past week (and some lower rated stuff from the last few days).

Perhaps not completely normalized by number of visits, but at least nudged a little by number of visits, to produce the user experience mentioned in the above paragraph.

Boys and girls! Set noprocrast to yes to reclaim your lives! ;-)

I can't help but think that Hacker News has made several design decisions that are geared specifically to keep people coming back over and over and over again.

Some that come to mind are not notifying you when someone replies to you, not having feeds for comments on a story, and not having a feeds for the beststories or bestcomments pages.

Why doesn't pg write a script to show this histogram across all users? I hope every hit is logged.

I definitely have a case of the CTRL/CMD+N then 'n' and it is just too easy, it is right there in the history.

Code compiling (CTRL/CMD+N then 'n'), db query taking > .0005ms (CTRL/CMD+N then 'n'), pondering the change I just made (CTRL/CMD+N then 'n'), etc etc and on and on.

It would be interesting to see if the data from the poll match the log data. I'm always curious about the accuracy of self-reporting in polls like this, with the ingoing assumption that people tend to be more estimators of frequency either with an aspirational bias (how often they think they should do something) or just a recent history bias (if I have done something a few times recently, I likely overestimate how often I do it). Lots of reported conclusions depend on polls like this. Since in this case the real data may be available in the logs of HN, it would be more interesting to me to see the comparison of real v. reported than it is to see the actual answers.

What I really want is to get the data from the server and compare the poll response with the actual number for each user. As in, "you reported that you check 1-5 times, but you average 12.7 on work days."

Great idea, but do we know for sure if pg has access to this data?

It really depends. Some days I'm commenting and submitting and reading and interacting a lot, and sometimes I'll go for a few days without saying or really reading anything.

I can do the same. I'll check once a day for say a week, then I'll post frequently and check several times a day (considering I'm away from a computer for my job, it's a feat when I can check 5+ times) and then randomly I won't check for a few days to a week.

Recently I'm down to a couple of times a week, and it's been great. I've recently finally restarted an old part time project I had kicking around gathering dust, and since I actually starting having something better to do in my spare time I don't feel the urge as much.

When I read HN a lot I get a pretty strong paranoid feeling that I'm going to be missing out on lots of amazing stuff that I won't be able to live without, but it turns out I can live without it just fine.

Too much. In fact, there is a plateau past which repeated checking turns up no new posts and comments. Haha, but seriously, quite often and closer to 10^2 times a day.

It's not addiction as much as it is boredom and a thirst for novelty. I only recently discovered HN and added it to my RSS feed.

Probably should do something about out-of-control RSS reading one of these days. It takes an outrageous amount of time albeit interstitial time between actual tasks. As far as "addictions" go, RSS-reading isn't so bad compared to say... heroin, chewing-tobacco, alcoholism, violence, smoking and philandering.

I follow the Twitter bot so I can get updates, but I still find myself checking the site frequently to see if there are replies to any of my comments.

I tend to complete forget about my comments

Notifo (http://notifo.com/) can help you with notifying you when you have replies to your comments, although you still need to visit the site to find out what they are.

I tend to use my karma as a proxy for whether I have replies to my comments. I figure if people are up-voting, then it was a worthwhile contribution, and they might be responding as well.

noprocrast is a life saver.

About anything that doesn't happen immediately causes me fairly too often to take a look at HN. I much prefer coding without internet.

True, although I often fall into a worse trap when that 'Get back to work!' message comes up by seeing what's on Reddit instead.

I usually just pull it up on my phone a few times a day and bookmark relevant links to read later (Opera Mobile syncs with my desktop). It depends on how many times I am in a position to randomly check on my phone more than anything and it´s not too often that I get on from my computer.

Weekdays: I check it at most 3 times when I am at work, and when I finally get home I load a tab and I check it at least 80-100 times till I sleep! Weekend: A constantly loaded tab that I check 5-10 per home hour.

Since day could be the whole 24h thing I naturally voted for 100+..sorry 10+

Wow. As of 9:12 PM Pacific time on 1/10/11, the '5-10 times a day' and '1-5 times a day' categories both have 247 points. Almost every time I've checked, they've been with in a few points of each other. For such a huge sample size, this is a surprise to me.

Why is that surprising? Those options have the same frequency.

Also - how much more frequently do you check right after you've posted an article or reply?

I'm going to lie and say 5-10 because I hope to god its not much more than that.

I subscribe to the RSS feed. Pull it every hour. I guess that's 24x a day...

Wow, talk about user engagement.

I subscribe via email using Feed My Inbox. I like that delivery mechanism because it limits my interaction with the site, which can be a little consuming. :P

I replaced the Twitter and Facebook crack with the HN Codein2

it is in one of the tabs almost all the time and I just hit refresh when I feel like reading something new or just checking how my comments are doing.

Actually I check HN via Google Reader, and I open the actual page only when [I think] the discussion around a link may interest me.

As a follow-up, I should post:

Poll: Are you ashamed of how much time you spend on HN?

However, that would be pointless as I think we all know the answer...

I'm not sure actually.

Better response: more often than I should.

In my case by following @newsyc20 on twitter amount of visits dropped sharply - but it is still high!

However often Google Reader hits the RSS feed. I only visit when there's a headline I like.

About 50 times a day, on bad days.

5 times a day ? Its really is very refreshing to come across so many ideas/opinions et all

The site is left open for the whole day here... just hitting F5 when I get some free time.

While we're on the subject of skimming HN let me just say that Instapaper is your friend!

2 or 3 times a day. I am preparing exam now. After that, maybe 5 or more times~

It (obviously) depends whether I have a computer in front of me that day...

Too often

5-10 times a day, I have pinned HN to my chrome's most visited list.

its in my bookmarks bar in Chrome ... when I'm bored for even 5 seconds or ahem waiting for my code to compile ... clicky clicky ... then ... 15 minutes gone!

I visit HN while in the bathroom.

(TMI?)

almost every time i use my browser, the first site i visit is hacker news. better hacker news though than something like tmz.com

Tried anti-procrast check box, didn't work...

A better question is: Why is HN so addictive?

I set it up as my new tab homepage

3 times a day. Is that bad?

@newsyc100 ftw.

5+ times a day

far far too often.

too much!!

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