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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?

#21

Post by Spyro7 »

d0ne wrote: post #16
vaporstun wrote: post #5

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…

Rough Estimate of users with Karma > 100: http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&biw=1...

I have to say that I did not know about the inurl google search parameter.

However, this is indeed a very rough estimate because the parameter 100...100000 also captures the number that indicates how long ago a user account was created, so it would also count accounts that were created a while ago (over 100 days) but were inactive.

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

#22

Post by [deleted] »

vaporstun wrote: post #5

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…

[deleted]

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

#23

Post by nosequel »

kmanlives wrote: post #13

My 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.

I also mess up the numbers. HN has so many ridiculous ways to log in, that I forgot a couple of times how I logged in (native, google, open auth, etc.) so I've created four or so accounts now. If I add them up I'm > 100, but no single user has 100 karma.

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

#27

Post by Alex3917 »

a5seo wrote: post #17
a5seo wrote: post #9

Earlier 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…

Here's a graph I found explaining the "link wheel" strategy: http://lemonarian.com/images/majorwheel.jpg

The sad thing is that it's not just spammers who need to do this. Even people who are genuinely creating great content in an attempt to help others still need to create backlinks from social sites if they want to show up in Google. I've made all sorts of resources that are far better than anything else that currently exists, but without actively going out and building a few backlinks these pages would get literally zero hits.

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

#28

Post by vaporstun »

gshahlot wrote: post #19
vaporstun wrote: post #5

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…

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.

It's certainly not a direct correlation, but it does help to sort the spam bots and people who created an account but never use it from the rest.

However, I did mention that the karma approach would not account for lurkers which was why I proposed the logged in method. There are many other interesting data points I'd love, but without pg releasing a lot of the info, it's tough (or in some cases impossible) to gather from public data.

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

#29

Post by AgentConundrum »

Spyro7 wrote: post #21
d0ne wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rough Estimate of users with Karma > 100: http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&biw=1...

I have to say that I did not know about the inurl google search parameter. However, this is indeed a very rough estimate because the parameter 100...100000 also captures the number that indicates how long ago a user account was created, so it would also count accounts that were created a while ago (over 100 days) but were inactive.

I knew about the inurl parameter; it's the range operator that's new to me.
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