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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Yes there was a definite uptick in commenting and submissions, but the overall traffic change (uniques and page views) wasn't huge.

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Actually, it looks like both doubled in six months:

    Jul 2010,"7,275,451","279,891,841"
    Jan 2011,"12,284,583","590,531,477"

And then a couple months later we realized we were undercounting and it jumped again. :)

    Feb 2011,"12,654,137","594,987,855"
    Mar 2011,"16,925,815","1,133,827,794"

Yes, but that was our traffic trajectory before Digg v4 too, wasn't it?

IIRC we were doubling every 8-12 months, and Digg sped that up a bit for us that year. It wasn't like a make-or-break moment, but we certainly felt it. :)

Fortunately you had just turned up a bunch of new servers just days before.

> Fortunately you had just turned up a bunch of new servers just days before.

We call that "capacity planning". ;)

That seems very unusual to have a large uptick in engagement without any corresponding increase in traffic. I'm not sure I understand how the Digg announcement would make existing Reddit users more active.

I imagine the existing users were both Digg and Reddit users, and started using Reddit more when they stopped using Digg.

Which one might expect would lead to more page views which jedberg said didn't happen. They didn't use the site more, they just became more engaged.

Keep in mind that commenting and voting don't count as page views since it's all AJAX. If you make no comments, one, or 50 on the same page, it's still one page view.

In fact, that was a main reason cited be people at the time as to why they liked reddit over other options -- because we didn't artificially inflate page views by forcing reloads.

It depends on how "page views" is defined, but I can imagine a case where the same number of pages were viewed, but the interactions on that page increased as people began commenting more on reddit than on digg. Reddit doesn't refresh pages when you comment, so if they didn't count the xhr requests as "page views", you could have more active, engaged users without significantly increasing the actual number of pages viewed.

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