Fun with analytics: pitting Hacker News and /r/programming against each other | Hacker News Reader

programming against each other

blog.untogether.co.uk

83 pointsuntog33 comments

I know this is just a fun article, but to get more serious for a minute; the missing thing here (what most people seem to forget when they're attracting traffic) is that neither of these audiences are part of his target market. He mentions his call to action is attracting votes, and maybe that's all he really cares about, but it's worth remembering that the target customer of this app is neither reading HN nor r/programming.

I don't have a good alternative for how to reach "iPhone-owning NYC cab riders who care enough to review drivers"; I'm just trying to make a general observation about these kinds of traffic-from-A-vs-B tests. Of course, I've assumed his objective is app sales, not attracting hacker/VC attention. Nothing wrong with the latter!

They sort of are my target market, given that my current objective is getting votes. If there were taxi discussion boards out there I'd give them a try, but it's not the kind of thing that communities form around. I figured other programmers/hackers would be more likely to help a fellow programmer out than the average person.

My long-term goal is, of course, to attract taxi riders. But right now the app is only just functional (and is a spare time side-project), so I'm not looking to get thousands of users just yet. Hacker/VC opinions on the app and/or concept are of course welcome, though :)

Patrick Mckenzie has mentioned this a few times: hackers put links onto the web disproportionately more than the general population, so you should try to attract their attention, even though they're not your target market.

I guess it does build some long-term equity with the search engines - getting those links as soon as possible can't hurt. But you have a valid point.

I'm not sure how he can reach his target audience in a scalable way, to be honest. It sounds too niche of a product.

It sounds too niche of a product.

Well, it's intended as more of a starting point. Both Seamless and Groupon had to start in one city before branching out- it makes sense. If you tried to scale out to every city simultaneously it would fall flat on it's face.

As for reaching target audience, well, the NYC-centricity of it is an advantage when it comes to advertising. If Taxonomy was an actual backed business (right now it's little side project idea) it could even advertise on and in NYC yellow cabs some day. Expensive, but the target audience is looking directly at them.

I frequent Reddit and HN. Although I dont read /r/programming, I do subscribe to /r/economics, /r/business, /r/entrepreneurship and I can say that I am much more likely to read a full article on HN than anything I find on Reddit. It might have something to do with the fact that I give the HN community more credit for having legitimate conversations about topics that arent purely sensationalist. Or that I go to Reddit looking for funny crap and only occasionally come across something good. On the other hand, I go to HN looking for good stuff.

Somehow this site has replaced Slashdot for me. The conversations are just as good if not a bit more neutral in tone. Also the articles are much fresher over here.

The original reddit, the one where pg article still made it on the top of the one and only front page, replaced Slashdot for me.

Once reddit was taken over by trolls, HN replaced reddit.

And now, it's HN with a small selection of sub-reddits with tiny and/or strictly moderated communities.

s/just as//

In all seriousness, when people ask me what HN is, I reply "It's like /. when it was relevant". Thank you for being here, HN.

>HN community more credit for having legitimate conversations about topics that arent purely sensationalist

/r/programming has massive issues with its userbase, they're opinionated and uneducated which is a disastrous combination. If you want to be with a supportive, interesting community you're better to stick to the languages subreddit (/r/python and /r/ruby are great) or HN. HN is superior in the fact it covers a broader range of topics.

As you mentioned reddit is great for entertainment, but not anything serious.

Exactly. Though /r/netsec is quite good, and /r/AskScience is pretty interesting at times. Also, /r/TrueReddit :)

Still, the percentage of articles I read is way higher on HN.

On the fun side, I love /r/ExplainLikeImCalvin/ ;)

> If anyone did go to the voting page them subsequently not vote, I’d be very interested to know the reasons why- let me know

This is why I didn't click: http://imgur.com/6ktsH

Same here. Although I liked your post enough that I spent a couple minutes and signed up using a temporary email address. Sign-ups like that irk me.

I figured as much. The drawback of appealing to a tech-minded audience :)

I don't know if it's tech minded, so much as just plain laziness. Clicking a button to say "hey, cool" is a lot easier than filling out another damn form with info you don't need.

Ah, but the lazy option is the "Login with Facebook" button- I'd say the tech crowd are much less likely to click that, for privacy reasons.

I don't typically do login thru FB, but your app was so impressive that I figured, what-the-hell. It's a travesty that it's not higher up in the voting but perhaps the winning entries are more likely to draw the crowd that's more OK with logging in through FB.

Thanks! I've accepted that I'm not going to win the popular vote (evidently don't have the social media chops!) but still hope to place somewhere respectable.

Same. For the record, I don't have a Facebook account, so it's not exactly "simple" to vote; there's a few fields to fill in (including a password? why?), and I assume I would have to validate my email, which I find infinitely annoying.

(If anyone did go to the voting page them subsequently not vote, I’d be very interested to know the reasons why- let me know.)

Well, I didn't vote because I don't have an iPhone, so I can't test your app.

You said, "which of you are nice and voted for my app." But would I really be nice? In a competition like this, each vote counts in detriment of all the other apps/developers; voting you up can be essentially seen as voting everyone else down. And when my only criteria is that you happened to post on HN and they didn't, I don't think it's fair to vote your app up.

I wasn't being entirely serious about people being "nice" (vs. nasty, I suppose) but you still have a fair point.

I would definitely encourage you to go to the main submissions page (http://2011.nycbigapps.com/submissions/), look through and dispense votes as you desire.

The competition right now is dominated by who gets the most retweets- I thought blogging was a slightly more constructive solution, but if independent voters are looking and voting based on independent merit, then that's music to my ears.

You may remember my post from a few days ago about making custom maps using TileMill. Purely for entertainment value, I took a look at my analytics logs from the day the post was a hit on both Hacker News and Reddit, to see how they and their users differ.

Can you provide any details of browser usage between the 2 sites? My guess is HN has more Firefox (as it's open source and hacker-friendly) and proggit has more mobile.

Sure. Ugly Google Spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AvcaBxBg441ZdFp...

Reddit actually has more Firefox. And HN has more IE. I guess more people are living in corporate hell than we like to think.

Thanks. As a web developer working on sites that see IE usage averaging around 60%, I can't imagine how much more rewarding it is seeing IE at just 2%.

Chrome's dominance over Firefox (~65% vs ~30%) surprised me a little. I figured they would have a more equal standing.

GetClicky makes this data /bitch/ to extract. I'm afraid I can only give aggregate from two stories in September, both of which hit both frontpages.

Chrome: 45.5% Firefox: 30% Mobile: 15% Safari: 5% IE: 2.8% Opera: 2%

... and one visitor allegedly on a PS3.

The analytics for my blog look very similar to this. A 24-hour period of intense activity followed by basically nothing. I had a post reach the front page of Hacker News [1] and /r/programming [2]; it got around 10,000 hits. I reached the same conclusion about HNers vs. redditors: HN stays longer and interacts more, but sends fewer hits.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3252582 [2]: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/mh5p2/i_acciden...

A couple of comments.

One side effect of your post (for me) is now I am following your RSS feed. So there might also be a long term effect of having more people follow your blog.

The cross section of Proggit and Hackernews has overlap. If more people are reading Proggit first, then Hnews then they probably won't click through again. So maybe more people read Proggit before Hnews?

Also, what happens when you normalize the traffic by the size of the Hnews and Proggit "populations"?

I've had a couple of articles hit both. r/programming is a traffic machine because it has a huge readership, not many articles, so stuff sticks around for ages.

I think www.writemoretests.com is blacklisted at r/programming though, which is a shame. Either I asked coworkers to upvote my stories too frequently, or someone took offense to my articles. Meh.

You can message the moderators and ask them why is your domain banned.

I did for my own blog and the response was that I got automatically flagged because lately I was only submitting links from a single source. One moderator then un-flagged my domain, but this means that if I don't submit links from other sources as well, I'll get banned again.

Also ... never ask people to upvote you.

off-topic, but pertaining to the OP's project at hand: the taxono.my project is a jaw-dropping effort...when I saw the custom-map blog post I assumed it was for a big startup, not for an entrant in the NYC.gov data contest.

I immediately submitted it to reddit/nyc and even logged into the NYC.gov site with my FB account to upvote it. From a quick glance at all the other top entrants, this not only seems to have the highest technical merit, but one that seems to have the highest utility and feasibility as well.

http://2011.nycbigapps.com/submissions/5832-taxonomy

Bravo.

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