Hacker News Reader

Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

For note, HN isn't necessarily increasing in popularity.

Number of HN submissions over 3 years: http://i.imgur.com/r9Ayvb1.png

Number of HN comments over 3 years: http://i.imgur.com/4FwglA8.png

It's possible for HN to be increasing in popularity while decreasing in # of submissions. For instance, if more users are coming to the site, the site is growing in popularity. If the X percent of users who normally submit the most frequently are decreasing their submission rates, submissions will go down despite the user growth.

Of course, this scenario assumes that # of submissions follows a power law distribution: a small percentage of posters make the majority of submissions. That pattern emerges on many content sites, especially sites with active forms of communal self-moderation. I have no idea if it's the case here, but it seems feasible.

Whoops, it should be noted that the spam algorithm changed at around the peak, which also explains the decrease. (I made the chart)

This data isn't relevant to the discussion.

IMO, the quality has degraded due to more people viewing the site, not the submissions. If I get my post on the frontpage of HN I can expect roughly 1,000 hits per hour. This wasn't the case 4 years ago when I first starting lurking here.

There are two problems with this:

1. More people (of poor quality) upvoting stories that attract the most attention (link bait, stories that aren't relevant, etc)

2. More people (of poor quality) upvoting comments that are not relevant to the discussion.

No graph will be able to chart this - it's purely subjective.

According to Google Trends Hacker News' interest seems to be be stable: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&q=hacker+news&...

But this is just one metric, how about the number of users? It certainly counts toward "popularity", doesn't it?

Does that graph include comments under "submissions", or only stories? I bet the latter. There are only so many conceivably-appropriate-for-HN stories out there, and many of the rest get taken out as spam.

If the number of comments, on the other hand, hadn't gone up since 2012, I'd be shocked.

Submissions only.

Here is a chart of the comments: http://i.imgur.com/4FwglA8.png

Thanks for making that! I'm not shocked. :)

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