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Comment by NavinF | Hacker News Reader

- Individual subs like /r/programming are larger.

- 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_...

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I've gotten traffic from HN and /r/programming, and the influx from HN is larger. I think it's a function of two things. First, /r/programming is higher-volume (i.e., more front-page links per day). Second, Reddit subscriber counts are not DAU / MAU, it likely includes a ton of inactive accounts.

Yes, it's extremely hard to get an apples to apples comparison of data across different platforms.

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.

Funny I just looked and Reddit says r/programming is 4.1m which last I checked is less than the 5 million unique visitors HN was getting a few years ago when I last saw stats by the moderator and I don't know what it's at now.

Twitter works completely differently from most platforms and isn't a unified community.

Where is that 4.1m number from?

I tried to edit my comment and missed the edit window. I was looking at the wrong sub.

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.

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