Ask HN: Hacker News Demographics

11 points·y1426i··6 comments

It would be interesting to see HN demographics and how it has evolved over the years (region, gender, browser, OS). Anyone who has that data and could post here?

View on HN

There were some polls over the years, for example age:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175588

And a comment has links to older polls

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2180045

Same for Operating System:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511643

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303726

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3786674

gender

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1421169

and region

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298905

googling for:

poll [xyz] site:news.ycombinator.com

will get you most of the results you want :)

I hope you can extract and share some interesting data from there :)

Some visualizations for these polls:

Age (bar):

http://hn-stuff.appspot.com/poll_chart/build/?thread_id=2175...

Region (bar):

http://hn-stuff.appspot.com/poll_chart/build/?thread_id=3298...

Primary OS (latest), pie:

http://hn-stuff.appspot.com/poll_chart/build/?thread_id=3786...

Build your own:

http://hn-stuff.appspot.com/poll_chart

Thanks egor :) . The pie chart with everything in shades of blue is a bit confusing, but bar charts do make things much clearer to visualize.

And thanks for feedback!

I updated the coloring a bit:

http://hn-stuff.appspot.com/poll_chart/build/?thread_id=3298...

Much nicer now ! Thanks.

As noted in some of the threads that GFischer has kindly linked to, voluntary response polling is not a reliable way to gather demographic data about HN. The HN webmaster may (or may not) have automated gathering of data about browswer and OS, although my wild guess would be that HN's participant population includes an unusually large number of persons who hide or obfuscate such data on the client side.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com