Thanks to these metrics, I've cracked the HN code:
We should always publish our content on paulgraham.com
That's the takeaway of these metrics, right?
Hacker News Data Analysis
61–70 of 79 posts
Re: Hacker News Data Analysis
#62"If anyone out there suspected that the 'old guard' had given up on HN, this chart proves them wrong." Of the people here since the first year, probably only 25% still participate regularly. Occasionally I'll stumble across some discussion from the early years in Google, and it's crazy how different the site was back then. There are still good comments now, but back then there were entire conversations that were good…
Alex, based on your kind reply to DanBC, you are tired of people calling you out for relying on Google University for your knowledge on controversial subjects. That may be tiresome, but it may also be good for the overall level of factual discussion here. My general observation of what excites people on Hacker News is that negative metathreads get more upvotes, by two orders of magnitude, than positive metathreads. I…
"you are tired of people calling you out for relying on Google University for your knowledge on controversial subjects"
I think it's funny how the more books I read, the more 'controversial' my knowledge becomes. I realize this is about as self-serving an argument as possible, but honestly I don't think I'm inherently interested in controversial topics, I think it's just that the more you know about something, the more wrong you're going to sound to the average person.
To give an example that most people on HN will agree with, why do you think the general public thinks eVoting is completely secure, while CS folks are generally horrified by the products that are actually used in elections? The same phenomenon applies to virtually every other area of life. Doesn't matter whether you're talking about medicine, agriculture, religion, climate change, education, etc. The more you know, the more wrong you're going to sound. (C.f. the presidential debates.)
Also, I'm usually fairly anti-Wikipedia these days. That's why I generally avoid linking there in the first place, though also to encourage people to actually read quality books or academic research. Wikipedia is often useful for finding primary sources, but
A) it's rarely comprehensive. Usually they just link to one or two primary sources at random, rather than the best ones or all of them.
B) it generally does a poor job at properly characterizing the arguments for or against something. Usually you just get 'some people believe this, other people believe that' without any indication that the case for one side might be much stronger than the case for another side.
C) It also tends to be out of date at any given time. Often not seriously so, but if you look up any of the statistics that the CDC or BLS publish on an annual basis then more often than not you're getting last year's data.
D) I agree with Jaron Lanier's point of view in his Digital Maoism essay. Specifically I think knowledge is inherently tied together with authorship, and that an article of 'facts' without a voice is just a "faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew."
Granted Wikipedia has a lot of advantages, but I think it's a poor substitute for reading actual books. And I especially think that it's generally a dick move to pretend that you're an expert on something after having only read the Wikipedia article, except for in certain niche areas where there is no authoritative source.
And again, I'm not trying to claim that I know everything by any stretch of the imagination, just trying to explain why some of my comments may seem 'controversial'.
Re: Hacker News Data Analysis
#63As someone who'se mildly colorblind, a few of your charts were near impossible to read. Especially the bottom three lines in Average Score by Category. Just a heads up.
Re: Hacker News Data Analysis
#64Actually the reason his posts stopped making it to the frontpage is that the last 3 before this all set off the voting ring detector. I don't know how accurate his other conclusions are, but it seems unlikely that new signups are down, considering the trend in traffic: http://www.archub.org/hntraffic-17oct12.png
I've never before gotten to see data like this from a popular website,
so my questions might be a bit ignorant or naive.
Do popular sites normally have the big (daily?/weekly?) swings seen in the HN traffic data?
Have you done any research correlating the high/low days versus the submissions present on those days? (i.e. are the swings content driven?)
Re: Hacker News Data Analysis
#65#1 Lesson from all of this: Instead of talking about your product to your prospect, talk about something your prospect cares deeply about to your prospect. I had no idea what you did and didn't really care until you used it in context of something I did care about: Hacker News. Now I know what you do, understand how it applies to me, and best of all, I'm starting to visualize how else I could use it. We should all ap…
Translation for those that missed it: This post is a (very good) sales pitch.
No, this post is the best kind of sales pitch. Instead of pitching his product, he uses it to create value for his clients. I found it an excellent read.
Re: Hacker News Data Analysis
#66Actually the reason his posts stopped making it to the frontpage is that the last 3 before this all set off the voting ring detector. I don't know how accurate his other conclusions are, but it seems unlikely that new signups are down, considering the trend in traffic: http://www.archub.org/hntraffic-17oct12.png
The traffic map most closely matches his active users map, which makes sense. If the number of new signups were still increasing, you should see a more exponential traffic graph.
Was there an error with the voting ring detector?
Re: Hacker News Data Analysis
#67"Interestingly, if you look at the number of upvotes cast each day, the trend is similar. For the past two years, the same number of stories have been competing for about the same number of votes each day." This statement, backed up by the analysis in the submitted blog post, is interesting. I visit the new page http://news.ycombinator.com/newest as many times per day as I visit the front page, looking for good new s…
I found it very interesting that the contributing userbase has gone up but the vote count has not. I've certainly noticed the userbase expanding, but would have guessed that voting followed.
Re: Hacker News Data Analysis
#68#1 Lesson from all of this: Instead of talking about your product to your prospect, talk about something your prospect cares deeply about to your prospect. I had no idea what you did and didn't really care until you used it in context of something I did care about: Hacker News. Now I know what you do, understand how it applies to me, and best of all, I'm starting to visualize how else I could use it. We should all ap…
Put another way this is classic "story selling" - wherein you use a captivating story to demonstrate all the points you would in a traditional pitch. Good stuff
Re: Hacker News Data Analysis
#69Actually the reason his posts stopped making it to the frontpage is that the last 3 before this all set off the voting ring detector. I don't know how accurate his other conclusions are, but it seems unlikely that new signups are down, considering the trend in traffic: http://www.archub.org/hntraffic-17oct12.png
The traffic map most closely matches his active users map, which makes sense. If the number of new signups were still increasing, you should see a more exponential traffic graph. Was there an error with the voting ring detector?
You can never be certain about something like a voting ring detector, but I'm pretty sure not.
Re: Hacker News Data Analysis
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
The traffic map most closely matches his active users map, which makes sense. If the number of new signups were still increasing, you should see a more exponential traffic graph. Was there an error with the voting ring detector?
You can never be certain about something like a voting ring detector, but I'm pretty sure not.
I work with robertjmoore. I, along with a few other colleagues at our small office, voted for his past three blog posts. Many of those votes probably came from our single office IP address. Many were probably also placed after clicking a direct link to the HN posting. There couldn't have been more than about 10 votes like this, because we don't have many employees. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I don't vote for many HN posts besides those written by authors I know.
Is this the behavior that HN's vote ring detector is trying to discourage? I understand that these things are a slippery slope - but if so, it's too bad, because quality content like robertjmoore's last three posts is getting lost, and I would imagine that other authors at small companies like ours are unwittingly falling into the same trap.
If there have been other posts explaining the DOs and DONTs of the HN vote ring detector, I apologize in advance for not having read them.