Google Trends: Hacker News vs. Slashdot | Hacker News Reader

Google Trends: Hacker News vs. Slashdot

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55 pointstaspeotis48 comments

I am a person who switched from Slashdot to HN. The discussions on /. very quickly went downhill when the beta was forced by default. It was already precarious at the time. HN is definitely of higher quality with the discussions (even though it has a few of its own issues), but Slashdot still has a few interesting front page articles that I don't notice on HN.

> Slashdot still has a few interesting front page articles that I don't notice on HN.

We'd love to see examples of those if you (or anyone) would email them to hn@ycombinator.com.

I'm using both as well. I like the extract of articles in Slashdot, which helps in getting idea what the news is about rather than just a catchy title.

It's far more interesting to expand the search further to 2004: http://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=Hacker%20News%2C%2...

Here you can also compare their current search levels to Slashdot when it was closer to the height of its popularity (spoiler: they're both at around 1/10th of that).

Also interesting to include Digg and reddit. If you extend the date to 2014, turn reddit off because you won't be able to see anything other than green, up, and to the right.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F05zpmc6%2C%20S...

Reddit and Digg are/were far more general, however. So I don't think it's a very valid or useful comparison to begin with.

Not in the beginning. There used to be a site that measured the time between when a story got to the homepage of slashdot vs. Digg. It was a tossup for a while but eventually Digg started winning out which is when I stopped reading slashdot. Then when Digg started to get inundated with non-tech related stuff, I switched to reddit which was mostly tech focused at the time (see [1]) and once that started to get filled with politics and other garbage, I finally found and switched to HN.

1 - http://www.wired.com/2014/01/the-gentrification-of-reddit-in...

The same happened to Digg and reddit. Digg started lagging behind reddit (things would show up on Digg's front page an hour or two after they showed up on reddits'), which then started lagging behind HN (at least r/programming).

Oh man, I remember when Digg had their big redesign snafu and reddit exploded and basically became the place it is now. Right in the middle of 2010 [1]. To me, that was the final nail in the coffin of the reddit where you could have good conversation and say controversial, if well-thought-out arguments without getting downvoted to hell. After that, memes and macros became the currency of reddit.

1. http://gigaom.com/2010/08/26/digg-redesign-met-with-a-thumbs...

> After that, memes and macros became the currency of reddit.

You really have to sign up to the special interest subs. Of course /r/pics isn't going to be a place for good discussion. But there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of excellent, active, well moderated subs all over reddit that cater to just about any topic and they aren't hard to find.

Slashdot seems twice as popular as HN by Alexa ratings: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/slashdot.org

Vs. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/news.ycombinator.com

Note that Alexa also shows 35% of inbound search traffic for HN is hacker news, but only 6.5% of slashdot's inbound traffic is from the slashdot term. So comparing the two terms to each other short changes slashdot.

Intriguing, apparently the majority of people access HN from school!? I thought us students were a minority here. It's also odd that India ranks so highly for slashdot...it's been a running meme there to remind posters not to keep a US only perspective.

I can see it honestly. A lot of students are beginning to think about startups instead of getting a traditional corporate job. Though, I'm a sophomore right now but I've never met anyone at my school who knows about HN.

Other way around for me.

As a CS major at Berkeley, it's hard to find a tech major who isn't thinking about going into startups, unless they're going into Finance.

Unless you're talking about a sophomore in high school, but for some high schools HN is still fairly well known. I'm definitely in a minority sample here, though, considering that a significant amount of people in my high school friend group dropped out of college to do startups, are Thiel fellows, are working at various tech companies in college, etc.

You have to start worrying about the quality of Alexa's data.

I wouldn't expect it to be outstanding for either site.

Makes sense. The URL for Hacker News isn't related to the name, so it's harder to remember. A large proportion of searches will be people who know where they want to go but can't remember the address. This group basically doesn't exist for Slashdot, so the proportion of searches for each site's name will overstate HN's popularity (although the growth trends are still relevant)

I always just type hackerne.ws into my browser but I see your point.

I like the news much better on HN, the comments better on Slashdot. I think HN has more informative comments, but the ones on Slashdot are generally more entertaining... (or at least they were before the beta change caused so many old timers to jump ship...).

I appreciate that hacker news is kept relatively free of trolls, but sometimes it goes a bit too far in my opinion. On occasion, a very clever troll can be quite funny, and there were some hilarious trolls on Slashdot...not so much anymore.

Sometimes I feel a bit of forced fake positivity on HN. People thinking they might get startup points or something if they say the right thing. Which I guess is understandable, but I enjoy a cynical funny from a smart person from time to time.

I don't enjoy reading things like "well PG says short comments are stupid....". Which kind of slavish kiddie crap neither enlightens nor amuses me.

Bottom line, I like both sites but HN is better.

Many of the so-called "trolls" at Slashdot are often mislabeled. A lot of the time they're merely the only people who'll ask difficult questions, or who'll point out flaws with arguments and reasoning that are painful for some to acknowledge, or who'll otherwise engage in some of the most intellectual and thought-provoking discussion. The fact that they're ruffling somebody's feathers is usually a good sign that they're making a valid and truly insightful point.

Or that the so-called "trolls" are just that. Alternatively, negative nellies who consistently go against the grain. If a user finds they ruffle feathers everywhere they go, then perhaps it's not the entire world that is incorrect.

Interesting how Slash is declining while HN seems to have hit a plateau. I wonder if that means there's another site on the ascendency out there somewhere.

reddit.com subreddits possibly.

Subreddits have a lifespan, they grow to a certain point, eternal September, and then become husks of their former selves.

The defaults actually just keep growing. Their quality might have declined, but they are only ever more popular than before.

I'm not referring to the number of subscribers. That does increase but quality of posts and comments/discussions drops drastically once they reach a certain user count threshold.

Soylent News is a possible contributor there.

https://soylentnews.org/

Any ideas what caused the leveling off of HN's growth around Nov. 2011? The curve looks like an exponential up to that point, and flat since.

Edit: Reddit's growth rate appears to abruptly change at around the same point actually. Jan. 2012 in their case: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reddit&date=1%2F2004.... Exponential before and after, but a much slower one after, and the change again appears quite abrupt.

I find it interesting because my site's growth exhibits a similar pattern - fast exponential for some time, followed by a slower exponential, followed by something that looks linear-ish. (And most of it could be loosely fit with a single slower exponential, like the reddit curve.) Each of the step changes in growth in our case can be attributed to specific events, so I tended to see them as anomalies, but I wonder if that kind of growth profile is actually more common.

Mostly speculation, but I do have a fair amount of experience in marketing, economics, and growing websites...

That can happen if you reach a maximum audience. In other words, everyone has seen your website decided to stay (or not) and unless they have a new reason to come back they are gone forever.

I suspect Hacker News may have hit critical mass because they have as many new members as leaving members. They received a fair amount of attention a few years ago and now are kinda "old news" for many people. Unless they improve retention rate or have a mass influx of attention (i.e. featured on CNN, Reddit, etc.) perhaps invent something new, it will remain relatively constant (or decline if they screw something up).

I converted from slashdot. Just more news and better discussion on here. I also enjoy the simplistic design. News and text first.

I am curios if that is what caused the downfall of slashdot?

Beta killed it!

Jokes aside, I feel like Slashdot has had some issues for a while and the purchase by Dice just accelerated them. They want a large amount of ad revenue from a niche site. It's hard to have quality and quantity, especially when you are more focused on the money.

- A lot of people who I think of as 'general users' flocked to Slashdot because it was the place to be if you wanted to know what was going on in the tech world. - The quality of Slashdot moderation -> articles -> comments declined overtime. Possibly, this was to attract more general users for ad revenue. - Slashdot moderation isn't as centralized or enforced as HN or a sub Reddit. This isn't a problem if everyone wants to stay on topic and discuss the details of the article but with so many general users you end up with: - "Beta" - "Typical Slashdot" - "I for one welcome our new [INSERT TOPIC] overlords" as highly rated comments again and again.

Same for me. I still go sometimes on the Japanese version when I when to read tech related things in this language.

Is this only interest based on search terms? If so, is that a representative measure for measuring relative popularity of two online publications?

Only based on search terms. Shows a lot but not definite, especially with Hacker News having multiple names and possible search terms.

This includes things like:

    * the hacker
    * facebook hacker
    * news hackers

Which don't seem related.

True for me. Just a few days ago I realized I hardly read Slashdot any more. There's not enough posts on Slashdot's front page.

Slashdot is a great source of news, but the comments system is "complicated" that's the reason I don't comment.

Agreed, HN is lot better but based on the search terms, Slashdot is at great disadvantage compared to HackerNews. Not really a definite comparison between the both.

I for one welcome our new HN overlords? In soviet Russia, hacker news posts upvote you? What cheesy Slashdot jokes am I forgetting?

You forgot the poll jokes, you insensitive clod!

You must be new here.

Netcraft now confirms: Slashdot is dying.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of HNs?

1. Come up with /. jokes

2. ...

3. Profit!

Natalie Portman and hot grits in your pants.

First post!

The inevitable CmdrTaco option for any poll.

Hacker News is pants.

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