Demographics of Hacker News by country | Hacker News Reader

Demographics of Hacker News by country

toolhub.tech

51 pointssine_break75 comments

Percentage of visitors relative to each country's population, top 20

  Switzerland     2.30
  Sweden          1.73
  Ireland         1.63
  Denmark         1.55
  Norway          1.48
  Netherlands     1.43
  Canada          1.26
  Finland         1.25
  United Kingdom  1.25
  United States   1.24
  Singapore       1.23
  Australia       1.13
  Austria         1.01
  Slovenia        0.95
  Lithuania       0.79
  Croatia         0.73
  Germany         0.70
  Portugal        0.68
  Israel          0.53
  Hong Kong       0.53

Via OCR/manual proofing/chatgpt population lookup/spreadsheet calculation.

I didn't include countries that had less than 0.2% of the visitors because of the error margin caused by the low number of significant digits. Iceland at 0.1% and a population of 370k, for example...

This is more interesting. Wow that list really barely differs from a top Human Development Index. Look at those top outliers

  Switzerland     2.30
  Sweden          1.73
  Ireland         1.63
  Denmark         1.55
  Norway          1.48
  Netherlands     1.43

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_D...

It looks like you're missing Finland: visitor share 0.7%, population 5614571.

Indeed. (ChatGPT silently removed that row...) Fixed now.

I'm a Swede living in Switzerland, and have previously lived in Ireland. I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from this, but I feel guilty of something.

>The data suggests that the majority of users come from the United States

41.2% is not the majority…

Interesting data though, thanks for it. At what UTC time range was the Google Shutdown post at the top of the board?

It's a relative majority

Plurality

Plurality is more common in the US, while relative majority is preferred in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_(voting)

...Although Brits tend to be familiar with "plurality" in my experience, while Americans tend to have no clue what a relative majority is (judging by the downvotes of the GP, it looks to be holding true).

i hate that i find this word so hard to say

Somewhere Between 10-14 UTC

So this post was on the front page from about 0300 to 0700 in California?

Yeah, I suspect the results are a bit off.

Nope, It is the estimated time-frame between which that post was the top post on HN.

It was on the first page for ~10 hours, starting around 10 UTC.

It was on the front page for a little less than 4 hours, beginning at 10:45 UTC. It was the #1 post just over an hour, from 10:50 to 12:00 UTC.

https://hnrankings.info/35553421/

(I'm a bit surprised that you got 30k visitors - that's more than I would have expected at that hour.)

That time of day suggests the American demographics are undercounted (not just US but Canada etc. too). On the other hand, your numbers are close to what I found when I did a similar analysis (already 5 years ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 (March 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444556 (Feb 2018)

> At what UTC time range was the Google Shutdown post at the top of the board?

Is there a tool to check this? Personally, I don't know of any, but I saw the article in the top 15 between 10 and 14 UTC time.

https://hnrankings.info/35553421/

Thank you dang!

> 41.2% is not the majority…

Yes it is if all other numbers are smaller.

No. Majority is a subset of a set consisting of more than half of the set's elements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority

Google search for "majority":

  noun
  1. the greater number.
     "in the majority of cases all will go smoothly"

Also, from your link:

> use of this term is inconsistent as it sometimes refers to a mere plurality (as opposed to an absolute majority)

They are both majorities, except one is absolute (more than 50%) and the other one isn't (more than anyone else, but not over 50%).

Weighting countries by 1/population would be interesting and maybe more useful to see the demographic.

Or to put it another way if euro becomes one country and US splits into states the stats look a lot different but the same people are using HN all the same.

Adding up the percentages from the graph, roughly 25% of clicks came from continental Europe.

Would be interesting to see the visitors by country (per capita) version too.

I felt that this is more in general trend with most websites, especially with visits from India. Despite being one of the most populous country with "high internet penetration", Indians usually don't seem to visit websites.

I know the post's is the data is from HackerNews visitors over a certain period of time -- when it was working time across USA's timezone.

Even on my own personal website (I'm Indian), India is like the 4th highest visitor with a hugh margin of difference from USA's visit. It, however, does catches up with USA to my family website though the difference still remains high with the top visitors - USA.

It would be nice to divide the total users by the country population to see the hacker news impact per country.

No mention of time zones when their post hit the front page…

Yeah that could make a huge difference. Doubt there’d be many nighttime readers from the US

I would expect that a lot of people didn’t click on that article because of clickbaity buzzfeed-style name.

Funnily enough, my HN account is 12 years old and back then I was located in Bangladesh with no concrete plan to come to the US. The US-centric nature of HN (or Reddit, 8yr old account) never bothered me, rather it gave more context to those post/comment tones.

You should filter out IP of VPN and hosting providers(VPS) https://github.com/X4BNet/lists_vpn/ and then account for day/night cycle around the world.

Would be interesting to use this post's analytics as a check against that data ;)

Yes it would wouldn't it. :D I can imagine a slightly different representation for this thread Vs one where many couldn't care less if google is being google once more.

Cyprus, represent! More of a lurker around here, as evident by my karma. I'll be honest, I did not expect my country to even appear. Pretty cool.

Interesting to see UK and Germany taking the 2nd and 3rd spots. Is there any easy explanation for why UK and Germany are at the next two spots? Is UK the next hotspot for IT after US? Is Germany too? What about China and India? Does it not have more IT crowd than UK or Germany? Or most of them don't visit HN? Interested in understanding these trends better.

I suspect HNers in China use VPN?

UK and Germany are also hotspots for startups, with large English speaking IT populations.

What amount of Chinese users frequent English sites? Do they have Chinese equivalent of HN?

Also I wonder how many percentage of Chinese are capable of sufficiently understanding English to frequent English sites.

Interesting that Singapore topped most of SE Asia. Gotta wonder what the spread's like across 1000 posts.

Sounds natural as they use English as a native language.

I doubt Asian people are as fluent in English as European people.

Possibly certain amount of numbers from those countries are native speakers living there.

My country is not even mentioned, and I am pretty sure I opened that post. (My country is situated just below India)

Less than 5 users visited the page, assuming you are from Sri Lanka.

How about Bangladesh?

Less than 5 visitors, B'desh and S'Lanka have equal number of visitors.

Thanks!

There's also a poll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30210378

I don't like that France's color in the chart is more orange than the Netherlands'.

Come on fellow Dutchies, we gotta move up one spot!

Should be supplemented with a per capita weighted graph.

Yeah, this is a tantrum... sorry...

I cannot wait to have IPv6/IPv4 HN access stats too... :P

Would be interesting to see that list compensated for the number inhabitants per country.

It's weird how many tools treat Puerto Rico as if it's not part of the U.S.

Gonna have to sample more than just 1 post I think

I wonder if the demographics are skewed due to Google being a US company, and thus perhaps people that aren't from there show less interest in the topic.

I asked GTP-4 to recalculate the data based on the population of the countries:

I did the sorting in Apple Numbers and somehow it botched the percentages. E.g. Iceland (291%) is actually 0.291% but I have no idea how to fix that. And I have to leave now. Sorry.

---

Iceland 291 %

Switzerland 229 %

Malta 200 %

Sweden 174 %

Ireland 168 %

Luxembourg 160 %

Denmark 156 %

New Zealand 156 %

Norway 153 %

Estonia 151 %

Netherlands 146 %

Finland 127 %

Canada 126 %

United States 124 %

United Kingdom 124 %

Singapore 120 %

Australia 112 %

Germany 101 %

Austria 101 %

Slovenia 97 %

Cyprus 83 %

Croatia 74 %

Lithuania 71 %

Portugal 67 %

Israel 58 %

Hong Kong 54 %

Latvia 54 %

Belgium 52 %

Czechia 47 %

Bulgaria 42 %

France 40 %

Poland 40 %

Slovakia 37 %

Armenia 33 %

Hungary 31 %

Spain 30 %

Puerto Rico 29 %

Serbia 28 %

Greece 27 %

Bosnia & Herzegovina 26 %

Georgia 26 %

Italy 22 %

Romania 21 %

Taiwan 13 %

Belarus 11 %

United Arab Emirates 10 %

Japan 8 %

Russia 7 %

South Africa 7 %

Argentina 7 %

Ukraine 7 %

Malaysia 7 %

Brazil 6 %

Turkey 6 %

South Korea 6 %

Ecuador 6 %

Chile 5 %

Kazakhstan 5 %

Colombia 4 %

Thailand 3 %

Saudi Arabia 3 %

India 2 %

Indonesia 2 %

Mexico 2 %

Vietnam 2 %

Kenya 2 %

Philippines 1 %

Egypt 1 %

Pakistan 1 %

China 0 %

Nigeria 0 %

It got at least NZ very wrong.

I'm afraid people are going to start posting information from all the AI tools without human checks for accuracy and pretend they're useful in discussions.

An obligatory reminder, esp. for US-based folks, that when creating posts/comments when writing things like 'our country', 'the president', 'here', 'in the parliament', 'the law says', 'everybody here knows', and not specifying geographical details, you're somewhat confusing and potentially irritating ~60% of HN community.

Not really. Unless specified the poster being US based is kind of assumed.

What would make you say that? IMO that's a potentially harmful assumption, I agree the demographics point to that but doesn't help when this isn't a real-time chat where things like these can be cleared up quickly

How is anyone meant to respond to this? You’re asserting it as some sort of irrefutable fact. It’s not. It’s how you’re choosing to operate. I for one find this assumption frustrating on an almost daily basis. I think less of people that do it.

Also don't assume all users are on the same planet or speak English as native language.

Indeed, as a French I find many Americans are lacking basic English skills.

Ironically enough, your post is wrong English. You can’t use “French” as a noun in English. Nobody would say “as a French” rather than “as a Frenchman” or “as a French person”.

I try to avoid doing that, but come on, you can just choose not to be irritated by something so minor.

(Somewhat off-topic, but in case anyone cares: we in the US call it the Congress, not parliament.)

If America has taught me anything, it’s that I absolutely can choose to be irritated by something so minor. ;)

+1 for being a bit irritated when I read claims about laws and regulations without any specification of the geographic place they apply to. It happens more on reddit than over here.

I always found this interesting because this phenomenon exists all over the internet (there's even a dedicated subreddit for it: /r/usdefaultism). If you don't make it extremely clear where you're from, for some reason the internet just assumes you're american.

I bet that a factor is that, while not the majority, it's the largest group

> this phenomenon exists all over the internet

No, it exists all over the parts of the internet that are run by US companies, hosted in the US, and primarily popular with Americans. Nobody is going to assume you’re American on Jeuxvideo.com.

In similar vein: Using two-letter abbreviations for US states that might as well be mistaken for two-letter country codes. For a long time I assumed people talking about CA were referring to Canada...

Personally I'm 100% fine with this. US-based company hosting this forum - US quirks (and features).

I only take issue with extrapolating US-specific things to the rest of the world. Case in point: I don't agree with around half of the statements on HN that explain something as "human nature" when in fact it's something that usually just the Americans say or do.

It's quite an interesting defaultism though, it gives us some insight into what people think.

There's this strange asymmetry: ask a non-American to name a US Supreme Court justice, a famous American businessman, an entertainer, a politician, and maybe some other categories that I haven't listed. We all know one, even though it might actually be hard to name the same for neighboring countries like Ireland or France.

Ask someone if they know the subdivisions of the USA, and if they know the subdivisions of their own neighbors. Do I know the mayor of anywhere in Ireland or France? I know the mayor of San Francisco.

The culture of what country is in the cinema, or the radio? Everywhere you go, it's the US, plus a little bit of the local. Check the top-10 lists of any country in Europe to see what I mean.

It's so strangely dominating.

I'm a Brit and still describe pricing when discussing online as USD because that's seemingly the "currency of the internet" that everybody seems to understand the value of.

Well put. Lines up with my comment ITT and my observations on the American side of things as well. There's a strange dynamic where a massive amount of people across the world have some cursory knowledge about the state I live in, whereas vice-versa I'd probably have to look up if their country even has states, provinces, districts, counties or what have you.

I used to be bothered by people assuming America as a default, but I've actually changed my opinion on this after doing an online political science course through the University of Nottingham.

The thing I found shocking while attending this course, was that even in a UK university, America was still the most frequent subject of discussion and reference, with the UK playing second fiddle. And then I would read comments as a part of the course from other places in the anglosphere where for instance, they are asked to name the first things that come to mind when they think of 'banal nationalism' and you read things like America's heavy use of bald eagle imagery, the American pledge of allegiance at sporting events, etc.

I've decided that since it seems nearly universal that English speaking countries give America primacy (even in the context of a non-American university focusing on a heavily European oriented subject), that there's no point fighting it. America's cultural hegemony has complete dominance over the English language.

But US-based website of a US-based company, right?

I'm a Brit, so yes, the defaultism rankles, but at this point I've just learned to accept that people write from their own perspective and to not accept that is pedantry.

Likewise when you use the word 'awesome'.

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