Many of the results are 'No such user'. Add 'karma' to the end of the query to get a more accurate guess: around 11,600
Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
11–20 of 71 posts
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#12If 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...
Yes, somehow.
See this:
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#13My account page exists, but I rarely post (4 comments); adding my username to the google search finds zero results, so there are at least 28,701, and likely many more than that.
My intuition is that there are many people that don't post at all or only post infrequently.
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#14Why 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 s…
Oh wow. Thank you for that explanation. It's impressive how many of these profiles were made. This means the total number of real HN accounts is probably significantly less than 28k.
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#15For comparison, pg posted figures on Feb 9 showing 90,000 unique visitors (timeframe unclear to me, but I'm guessing daily) - http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-9feb11.png
If (as the results of my Google search revealed) there are 28,600 members, then 90,000 uniques is roughly a 2:1 lurker ratio (almost certainly much higher, given member!=active member, and not all members visit every day)
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#16I'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…
Rough Estimate of users with Karma > 100:
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#17Why 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 s…
Here's a graph I found explaining the "link wheel" strategy: http://lemonarian.com/images/majorwheel.jpg
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#18It would be really nice to have dataset available for researchers with username, their posts and their comments. As an example, we could use the "SPEAR Algorithm"[1] to find expertise in specific domains per HN user.
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#19I'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…
100+ karma won't exactly be a good parameter. I am a regular at Hacker News for around 3 months now , mostly just to read the content & up-vote the ones I really like. But my karma has been at 1 forever now, maybe because I don't comment much, not sure. Still karma does not say much.
Re: Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
Oh wow. Thank you for that explanation. It's impressive how many of these profiles were made. This means the total number of real HN accounts is probably significantly less than 28k.
I'd count "real" profiles by requiring that they either post a link, have at least one non-dead comment, or upvote a non-dead comment.