Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.
There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.
Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.
- HN is ~100x smaller than twitter which is itself not even in the top 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
I do my best to account for that.
I remain mystified by people who compare HN size as a community to Reddit or Facebook or Twitter (aka X) which are platforms, not communities.
Twitter works completely differently from most platforms and isn't a unified community.
R/programming is currently 6.5m, which doesn't matter because it doesn't invalidate my statement about the last time I checked.
If you want to claim r/programming is actually larger now, you need a current citation for HN traffic which you may not be able to find.
And keep in mind it's going to be tough to compare because Reddit members isn't actually a comparable figure to MAU, as noted elsewhere.