A 6 hour window is less than 1% of a month. If you think HN has 100K MAUs then you should expect way less than 28,000 people to hit HN during that 6 hour window to see the link in the #1 spot. Even if the article was on the front page for a full day you wouldn't expect 28,000 clicks because fewer than that would be hitting HN on that particular day. Traffic isn't distributed linearly across the month but still.

Even then, I don't think this is a representative snapshot of HN users anyway. The average time on the site was 37 seconds. That's enough to work out what it's about and decide it's not interesting (to that person). As Codeamigo is a coding school, and HN has a lot of users who can already code, that's not surprising. It's likely that far more people read the comments first and didn't bother clicking after understanding what it is.

More importantly than all of that though, is that the link wasn't about Codeamigo. It was about starting it after being rejected by Codacademy. The interesting part of the narrative was about coming back from rejection, not the product itself. The fact 28,000 people clicked at all is amazing.

You know what would be nice? HN stats! Active users (daily, monthly, etc.), how many posts a user checks on avg., how many comments per user, how many submissions per user, top commenters, top etc. etc. etc., breakdown per OS more etc. etc. etc. :)

@HN, what do you think?

From Dang [1] in 2020.

>These days around 5.5M page views daily and something like 5M unique readers a month, depending on how you try to count them.

And that is excluding API access.

Generally speaking I think it depends on the topic and time of day it is on HN front page. Since HN is mostly US specific so it starts at around GMT-4 during working hours. Yes. People surf HN more during works, that is why you see lower submission on weekends.

I am also suspicious of decline in page view on HN. Compared to pre 2020. At least the upvote number on front page and comments seems to be trending downwards.

And yes, I do wish HN could have more stats available

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808787

I don't click on every #1 link.

I probably click the #1 link less than 10% of the time and idunno there's only like a 1 in 3 chance I check HN when any given story is on the front page, so from their 29k views now I'm thinking HN is 1M active users. Which of us is way off?

Some guestimating: I clicked on 3 of the current top 10 posts, so if that's a representative click-through rate then that would put the HN community at ~100k daily active users (which probably means more like 1M monthly). That's assuming the post stayed in the top 10 for 24 hours, or at least long enough for visitors from every time zone to notice it.

I think it'd be hard to back into that number only based on the analytics of one top-page link. I had almost a quarter million hits from a #7 post in January.

Here are more details:

https://forum.photostructure.com/t/front-page-of-hacker-news...

I personally very rarely actually go check out what is linked on HN, due to mostly using it on internet connections with very restricted speeds.

I also know a fair few people in my social circle that do the same, HN is the goto "I need good content that doesn't zap 100mb of data in 3 minutes" place