Poll: HNer types | Hacker News Reader

Poll: HNer types

21 pointsalexandros15 comments

I was thinking about the type of users that make up this community. I know what type of activities I do with the site on a daily basis, and I know they are not enough to keep the site going. So I conjectured that there are a number of 'primitive roles' that are needed to keep this site operating well. My list is:

Posters: They post new articles they find from the outside world.

Commenters: They comment on stories they find on the front page.

Upvoters: They upvote stories they like on the front page.

Filterers: They frequent at the 'new' page and upvote stories they like there.

Readers: Those that simply read the content (nothing wrong with that, they are probably the largest group by far).

So, please vote up the set of roles that you feel describes the activities you do a lot of.

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Do you see the irony in your poll :-)

this is inherently skewed. many reader onlys dont have accounts and so wont vote and so will be vastly underrepresented. like asking how many people who voted for president are under the age of 18.

Fair point. Nothing I can do about it though. In any case, the interesting bit is the correlation between the other roles.

I don't post because I most of my information from HN and Reddit. I let the community be my filter.

I do occasionally comment, though, and I read lots.

I lurked via RSS only for a very, very long time before I made an account. Now, I still primarily read, but I also comment. I occasionally hit the "new" page and upvote things if I have some free time.

If I find something interesting, I usually don't even think about posting it, as I'm too lazy to check to see if it's a duplicate or not. Is there a cure for that problem (or my laziness)?

There is! If you submit a link that has already been submitted you'll just be sent to that post's page instead of posting a dupe.

This works, but not a perfect solution because the URL must be identical. For example if I post the link to the 'printable' version of a page this will not work if only the standard page has already been posted.

Pretty impressed by the number of reader-only having an account.

Deleted comment

I think it's implied that everybody is at least a reader. Would get a little tedious to see that on every voting option.

There are a lot of options on here - I think you might run into trouble with people not feeling like scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the list.

I guess it would be nicer to have four options and the choice to click all applicable, and then have a combination results view. I guess we have to work with what we have.

Us reader-only voters are hypocrites!

So are us reader-only commenters!

P.S. I upvoted you. :)

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