Hacker News Insight | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Insight

hackernews-insight.vercel.app

92 pointsHooopo38 comments

The "Users who got the most voted on hackernews" should exclude the 1 upvote you get for your actual submission (if it is being counted, which I think it is). If it is counted, the sheer volume of submissions by the top posters makes it seem like they are getting more votes from the community than they are.

I love how "ski" is such an outlier for highly upvoted TLDs. Either the Hacker News crowd really loves skiing, or ciechanow.ski is responsible. I bet there is a similar story for most of the other TLDs on the list, but don't recognize any of the others (except for home.cern which is pretty obvious).

Statistically, you'd expect the most successful (and least successful) TLDs by success rate to be low-volume. The high-volume domains will cluster around the middle.

A lot of us are from California or the Seattle area. I could definitely see skiing being a common hobby for that demographic

Anyone have thoughts on why the number of text stories spiked over 4x at the start of this year?

https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/overview#How%20many%20...

This was a similar one from last year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778994

https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...

https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective

Whoa - people submit thirty thousand stories. I mean I can imagine drunk commenting a badly thought out phrase a few thousand times (that's basically my metier) but ... reading an article, being amazed, and submitting it ... that's a lot

Edit: Just to point out this is not necessarily a criticism or some snide remark. I am pretty sure that back in the day I would have looked at similar Wikipedia stats and gone "whoa there are people who basically have a full time job trying to organise an online encyclopaedia." Then I would have assumed I could code it in a weekend. The point I think is not "these must be low effort submissions" but "HN has a more diverse ecosystem than a rando like me posting every so often"

In short - who knows what the forums of the future will look like or be? HN does not look like the forums from ages back - it maybe something new.

> reading an article, being amazed, and submitting it ... that's a lot

I'm pretty sure they skip steps 1 and 2!

Must be some sort of bot or marketing service. If you look at their posting history, they submit the same article over and over again. This should be filtered or flagged.

People could at least recognize people who are farming karma and stop upvoting them.

> In short - who knows what the forums of the future will look like or be? HN does not look like the forums from ages back - it maybe something new.

HN is the closest to the forums of yesteryear of anything I can find on today's internet, and that's definitely what I like best about it. (Not just the visual aesthetic, but also the tone and dedication to maintaining its original sense of community.)

I may not be a good representative sample, but the forums I remember were fairly niche (transatlantic life advice) and consequently small. 4chan style meltdowns were avoided but HN is on a different scale. It might be an aberration, it might be a new way to moderate / build community. I am not sure but it is a very interesting question how we got here. And is it replicable?

And if there are people who do the equivalent of full time work making it so - that's a clue to ... something

> And if there are people who do the equivalent of full time work making it so - that's a clue to ... something

dang, who seems never to sleep, surely puts in even more than full time work, and is responsible as much as anyone else for HN being what it is.

Absolutely. But it is his actual full time job. I think an interesting signal is when people who (#) are not paid still spend an enormous amount of time on a "thing". That's either you have found weirdos, or found some level of market fit - gold flakes in the river bed if you like.

(#) I am assuming all the people with really high submission rates are not HN moderators or otherwise employed / encouraged.

I'm almost sure those are points and not submissions, as the numbers are the same as in 'Users who got the most voted on hackernews'.

Very interesting. Why is there such a massive spike of text stories after 2021-11-01?

Wow, some of these users seem to be quite addicted to this site.

I would like to ask coldtea, DanBC, dragonwriter, dredmorbius, jacquesm, jonbaer, pjmlp, pseudolus, rayiner, TeMPOraL, Tomte, tosh, tptacek, and others in the top list — why?

A few of those users are well known in their own right. Seems they value being a contributing member of this site. They often come by to comment when other users drop their name or link to their articles.

Cool!

A couple of questions:

1. How did you gather the data?

2. What's the architecture / tech stack? Data store, data pipelines / back-end, front-end? The presentation layer looks really neat.

The home page of the Hacker News Insight site (https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app) gives a bit of background about the stack: it's a TiDB Cloud database (https://www.pingcap.com/tidb-cloud/) and Evidence front-end (https://evidence.dev)

The code for the site is here: https://github.com/hooopo/hackernews-insight

Sadly no in depth write up.

Data is available on the HN API. There are a number of OSS projects which use that.

I would like to see the top list of most upvoted users but only counting their comment scores, not submissions.

In the list of the top 10 users who got most upvote, one of the user is mooreds who runs an amazing newsletter call "Letter to a new developer"

https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/

Highly recommend to follow mooreds and his newsletter. It's great that he spend his time to tailor and help the new developer.

Not affiliate with mooreds in any mean just a happy audience.

I remember there was something similar last year, where the top 5% or 10% of users (based on karma) were listed/ranked. Any bright mind with free time willing to do something like this and share it? (Yes I know the answer, I should do it :-))

Users with most karma are always available on the leaders list: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Very cool. I think these stats show how hard it is for a web app to grow in terms of users. Less than 1m users even though it's a well known and "mainstream" site.

For comparison, /r/programming has 5m+ users.

I'd love to know how many are reposts that are years old. It seems like fully 1/4 of posts on the front page have a year indicator after them.

[Keyword Analysis] 13 years ago ... there was buzz around Web3 !?

[Overview] Text Stories created jumped from ~2000 to ~9000 in Jan 2022

I would love to see Android/Google vs. Apple/IPhone statistics.

This is really nice.

Huh, what was the bump for web3 before 2012 for?

Semantic Web 3.0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

Like the word "metaverse", it used to mean something else ("semantic web" in this instance) before it got co-opted.

Cool, 38.7k no-context Wikipedia articles.

I actually took care of that and combined (the best) Wikipedia articles with their discussions. Here you can see more:

https://www.mostdiscussed.com/

Wikipedia submissions are ok for HN if and only if something more specific isn't available. It's best to search for something else on the topic first, and if you can't find anything interesting, only then to post the Wikipedia page.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You can be the change you want to see by making the kind of comments you'd like to see—hopefully not this sort. I think one can't tell from these summary statistics which articles are posted without context; and there definitely have been numerous Wiki posts that just fall into the "huh, I didn't know that exists, but I'm glad I do now" category that didn't need any additional context to be beneficial, at least for me.

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