Traffic stats from a #2 post on Hacker News + Viral Loop

I have seen that article before. From other people. Many times. The first ones were kind of interesting, but I think this meme needs to die now. I apologize if that sounds rude to you, please don't take it personally.

If I as an HN newbie may be so bold to say: what bothers me is that HN is being used as a marketing instrument. I can only speak for myself, of course, but the reason I come back here is HN feels like a medium where I'm not inundated with "viral" crap and sales pitches. For me, this place is about the exchange of ideas and honest criticism.

Don't get me wrong, one of the things I love most around here is when people show off their new projects. I think it's a great environment to do this, to get early feedback and maybe even some kind of recognition. But playing HN for the numbers of visitors feels wrong to me, and it feels cheap.

I believe the discussion inside the threads is where the real value lies. Not in the karma you get for posting the link. And certainly not in the highly irrelevant visitor count of your website.

The more "look how many hits we got from HN" posts that get voted up, the more people will be enticed to spam/game HN.

I'd like to see a moratorium on this kind of meta-content.

As PG said: "There ought to be a word for this phenomenon where people follow a post that got them a lot of traffic from HN with another about how much traffic they got."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2371252

Not to be pedantic, but it's not a functioning viral loop if it dies after a few days and requires another HN or TC post. A true viral loop has exponential growth with each participant recruiting > 1 new member.

Its quite indicative of the audience here that on the top 10 browsers IE does not appear, whereas if I look at daily traffic for the health site I work on in my day job (older and significantly less techy demo) IE is the number 1, 2 and 3 browsers.

Interesting. I hit the HN top 10 on friday, (highest rank was #5) and traffic continued on twitter (even to this day) so I can't say what the total outcome was. Because of the broader appeal of my post, I'm still seeing ongoing RT's on twitter that are driving significant traffic. Here's a snapshot of my stats so far, which doesn't (of course) include today's traffic, which is continuing at a slightly lower rate than the prior 5 days.

http://i.imgur.com/PjULs.png

Most people using chrome makes plenty of sense to me. I'm surprised that Linux is so underrepresented and Mac users are so dominant. Any thoughts why?

My only reason to ever have a post rank high in Hacker News is for the great discussion that ensues.

Hadn't heard of Clicky before; it looks really interesting.

I might have to use that + Analytics/Gaug.es instead of what I've been doing (which is not much).

Browser/OS breakdown doesn't show IE! A good thing for the web developers ;)

Site is down. Was really interested in seeing what the article was about.

As before, if you want access to the Mac desktop app right now, append "+hn" to your email (ex: email+hn@domain.com)