Waking up to Hacker News
johnathannader.com
johnathannader.com
A while back I had one of my blog posts get picked up by some karma-farming account on Reddit, which ended up driving a few thousand views to my site. It was a weird but cool feeling to know that many people read something I wrote. (This was the post in question, which I think is probably the best thing I've written on my site: https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2023-04-05-svg-circle-of-fifth...)
In a similar vein to this post, I posted about an open source project of mine in the fantastic "Most Interesting Tech You Built For Yourself" thread a week or so ago (this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729232).
Until reading this post, I didn't realize that GitHub had analytics on repos, so it was kind of cool to go check that out today, and realize that my little comment in that thread resulted in about 100 people going to check out my repo. I even had about 20 clones happen apparently, which I think is neat.
There is a bit of a dark side to this though, I have to say - I often find myself refreshing my analytics page with slight obsessiveness after I announce a new post on my blog.
I think for my own situation - where most posts are lucky to break 50 views - it's probably fairly benign. But it makes me wonder how people with millions of Instagram or Twitter followers end up feeling when they see crazy engagement on something they do. I can imagine that it's a weird and potentially very affecting feeling - especially on platforms like those where you can get more direct feedback from readers (and insults, hatemail, death threats, etc).
I was curious and looked it up, and apparently some of these are done by automated tools. My projects have gotten a tiny bit of traffic, but oddly enough there are always more clones than visitors.
Similarly, there are a bunch of requests in my site's analytics for files that don't exist - some of them are normal, like the sitemap, but others seem to be WordPress and other framework specific files (my site is not a WP site). My guess (without any background knowledge or research) is that bots are trying to fetch these files to scan for known vulnerabilities. Again, kinda neat or scary depending on your standpoint.
I can totally relate to this, in fact, the seriousness of your addiction to HN can be measured by if you read it after heading to the toilet in the morning or before; I’m the latter type.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35838504 (> 90 comments)