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Hacker News Analysis

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Re: Hacker News Analysis

#4

Post by tokenadult »

Alas, the date of the submitted article is 14 March 2011, so all the data are from before the recent round of experimentation announced by pg.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333

Considering that pg had asked just before then (28 days ago, also after the date of the submitted blog post) how to "stave off decline of HN,"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

it may be that there are differing opinions about the quality of posts to HN in the early part of 2011. Writing then, he said, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#5

Post by DTrejo »

I would love to see something like this from PG.

In specific, I'd like to see information on the following in relation to the recent changes in HN:

    - increase/decrease in activity of users with highest karma
    - increase/decrease average in comment score, normalized 
        by time after post of OP
    - amount of time the highest rated posts stayed on the front page
    - trends for # of flags
Also, it would be great if he put the guidelines on the submission page.

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#6

Post by topomorph »

eru wrote: post #2

Interesting analysis. I strongly disagree that what he defines as "Quality of Posts" measures quality of posts, though.

Yeah, that measure was super hacky and I have no justification for it (but it was the simplest/only thing I could think of at the time). Do you have any suggestions?

One thing I'm thinking of now is seeing how (# points at the xth percentile) / (# points of 10th highest rated post) changes over time. (Or maybe I should just take a closer look at how the overall distribution of points changes to get a better feel first.)

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#7

Post by tptacek »

You're working from a different definition of "good comment" than Graham is. The concern with "bad" comments isn't simply that they exist, but that they have deceptively positive scores.

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#8

Post by eru »

topomorph wrote: post #6
eru wrote: post #2

Interesting analysis. I strongly disagree that what he defines as "Quality of Posts" measures quality of posts, though.

Yeah, that measure was super hacky and I have no justification for it (but it was the simplest/only thing I could think of at the time). Do you have any suggestions? One thing I'm thinking of now is seeing how (# points at the xth percentile) / (# points of 10th highest rated post) changes over time. (Or maybe I should just take a closer look at how the overall distribution of points changes to get a better feel firs…

I don't know how to come up with a statistic that reflects quality of comments at the top of my head.

But the statistic you chose is an interesting one. As is the distribution of points.

Re: Hacker News Analysis

#10

Post by topomorph »

zdw wrote: post #3

No graph of Apple in the "mentioned companies" section? I'd be very curious how they were trending.

D'oh, Apple always strangely slips my mind when I think of software companies. I added a graph (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10506/blog/hn-analysis/pct_apple.png). Interestingly, it's the company with the clearest upward trend.
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