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Ask HN: How many HN members are there?

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Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?

#3

Post by cryptoz »

d0ne wrote: post #2

If Googlebot is doing its job then there are around 28,700 registered users on Hacker News.

If someone creates an account but never posts, will there ever be a public-facing link the the userid page? If not, then Googlebot could be doing its job perfectly but have a totally inaccurate number of registered users using this method.

I'm curious what the actual number is now...

Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?

#5

Post by vaporstun »

I'd be interested to see some analytics, such as how many users are there with 100+ karma because that's likely a better measure of the number of active users than the number of registered users (many of which are likely inactive). However, that doesn't account for lurkers.

Or, the number of users that have logged in within the past week though this is probably something pg would have to give us because I can't think of any way to determine that without the backend data.

Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?

#8

Post by kylec »

joejohnson wrote: post #4

Why are there so many usernames that are perscription drugs? On the first page I see Zithromax, Zoloft, Zyprexa and Abilify.

It appears that most/all were created 1070 days ago and have 1 karma. I suspect that it was probably an attempt to rig the voting of a post.

Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?

#9

Post by a5seo »

joejohnson wrote: post #4

Why are there so many usernames that are perscription drugs? On the first page I see Zithromax, Zoloft, Zyprexa and Abilify.

These pages rank at the top of the site: search because they have a lot of backlinks. Why? Because someone created the profile, then went out and created links to their profile page (e.g. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnews...). Why? Because they were probably planning to drop a link on their HN profile page to a page that sells Zithromax.

This is a common strategy on Youtube or really any social site that gives you a profile page and the ability to drop a followed link. Even if you're building junky links to your HN profile page, the overall domain authority and trust of HN is relatively high, so it's a way to launder link juice and create a quality link to whatever it is you're selling.

Eric Ward wrote about it here: http://searchengineland.com/social-link-manipulation-11429

There's a fairly good sized contingent of the affiliate marketing world that depends on this link building strategy.

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