Comparing Hacker News & the Slashdot Effect | Hacker News Reader

Comparing Hacker News & the Slashdot Effect

cmdrtaco.net

163 pointsCmdrTacoMalda54 comments

Almost 10% of us are mobile. On a small screen with slower bandwidth HN is a lot nicer than /. Almost annoying that even though the site is so efficient already the site icon and the logo aren't the same url or that the arrows are not unicode arrows or just one image rotates or ... :)

Agree about "Y", I often tap it and end up at YC when expecting HN.

Given that it does go to YC it makes even more sense to have it be the YC site icon so if the YC guys ever change that logo/icon HN would automatically get it. Then again a lot of mobile browser don't fetch the site icon so couldn't it just be a 'Y' in an orange box with no icon fetching at all?

Looking at the code one way to speed up the total site load time would be to have the main page be static and completely cachable. onload have it fetch a list of articles and populate the main page. This way it would fetch the articles and images all at the same time v.s generating the main page, and then fetching the resources.

Use the 'N' instead. That seems to work just fine.

I'm not a mobile user and I have HN loaded as a Firefox app tab. Go figure.

I don't know if I can agree with you about bandwidth. HN has been really, really slow lately. It's a constant and long-lived malaise. Slashdot loads much quicker.

I think he means that the design of the site is better if you have a not-so-good connection, as HN is much lighter in the HTML department.

This. HN loads a lot faster than Slashdot if you're ever on a slow connection.

On a related note: http://ihackernews.com/ offers a nice UI for mobile.

In other words, Slashdot sent fewer people, but they stuck around a little longer.

His hunch is that it relates to the story. My hunch is that HN users usually have many links to read through on any particular visit, whereas Slashdot's post level is low enough that you can spend 10 minutes on a single item. They're pretty chalk and cheese as far as experiences go.

That's a good point, although the question is on HN and SD, what % of items do users actually click on? While HN has far more single news items, Slashdot has a lot of comments, and the articles themselves are longer. Apples & Oranges to be sure.

Or perhaps it was people like me who had been away for the summer and had missed Taco leaving Slashdot, so when faced with the story when click-crazy attempting to find out what had happened.

Are stetsons, really cool? I thought that was fezzes

I'm surprised to learn that as many as 2% of Hacker News visitors use IE. Why? Who are you?

Windows 7 Phone using IE (was curious and don't regret it)

Does it really matter what browser you use to view HN? It's not like it has any modern requirements for proper use. I happen to use Chrome to view HN only because I setup a "clean" Chrome install for a handful of news sites I visit. I could have easily done the same for IE and it wouldn't change a single thing. Maybe I'm grumpy today but this seems like a waste of debate-energy.

It doesn't matter. I'm just curious. Sorry to offend you.

My fault...I was grumpy, thanks for apologizing although you totally didn't need to. I love the debate here but grow tired of the old browser war subject.

Unfortunately, it matters to some degree. The comment indentation doesn't work properly in elinks :(

The indentation is fine on IE7 mobile (WP7).

I sure would hope so.. Kinda a different animal isn't it?

Any time I'm using my phone to browse, it's IE - and I use that to read through HN all the time.

My employer (a public school system) has blocked everything but IE9 on port 80 to keep students from using proxies/tunneling/[other firewall avoidance method].

I'm curious - do they check the user agent? Or something more complex?

It's possibly they just locked down the work stations to disallow anything but IE, then don't have WiFi for laptops.

It could be a Windows domain policy. Active Directory is a really powerful management tool.

Chrome Frame?

Some of us browse HN at work with prehistoric browsers or micromanaging IT departments that won't even let us run a portable version of Chrome.

Plus, my beautiful phone is IE.

I guess people that work/contract at BigCorp.

From 1-2011 until 5-2011 I contracted for a company that had no internet for most and IE6 for some.

People at BigSoulSuckingCO who are only allowed to use IE?

Travelers using the computer at an internet cafe or a hotel lobby.

IE6/XP. I'm at work at a fed agency. It's frighteningly outdated here.

Hey Rob!

The person who squatted 'cmdrtaco' on HN claims to be saving it for you, and they put contact details in the profile.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cmdrtaco

BTW, you must be new here ;)

I just get "Error establishing a database connection" which is some sort of delicious irony...

Is there still a CmdrTaco user? http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CmdrTaco says no ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CmdrTacoMalda

That isn't the question... The question is, is there anyone squatting in the username cmdrtaco? I hope not, because that's just not cool.

There was someone squatting the username and they posted in the last Taco HN submission asking Malda to contact them via email (listed in their profile) to claim the account. He may not have seen that or just not mentioned in this write-up.

> Is there still a CmdrTaco user? http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CmdrTaco says no ..

The URL is case-sensitive, I guess the user registration is not:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cmdrtaco

I wrote a similar post a couple of weeks back from my (shorter) stint on HN: http://willgrant.org/hn-traffic-stats-summary/

It looks as though the HN effect has brought down the site. At last. Maybe 16 cents didn't quite cut it after all.

Um ... I'm guessing what this says is that the HN effect takes down the site?

As CmdrTaco says, two things reveals that HN users are a little more 'on the edge': more Chrome users, more mobile users. BTW, HN seems to have also _more_ Safari users, even if he says the opposite.

I see this as /. users prefering open source browsers (i.e. Firefox) more.

Subjective. I use Firefox because it's a more stable, modern, and featureful browser than Chromium in my opinion. That doesn't make one of us more "on the edge" than the other.

You're basically saying that since one community prefers strawberry ice cream to chocolate, they're more modern somehow.

worst post ive ever read

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