HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

Which illustrates that Google analytics reports something, but what it reports is what it reports. To put it another way, Google Analytics records information useful to Google. What it reports back to the datapoint is designed to appear useful to the datapoint. The purpose of the information provided is solely to encourage the datapoint to keep using Google Analytics so that Google can keep using the datapoint's website to track people on the internet.

It may be that I'm not the only person that does this kinda thing.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1006253?hl=en

This is because when I did read more of them, they usually turned out to be a lot less interesting than the ensuing discussion on HN.

So now I use the HN discussion as a proxy for article quality. In the HN discussion I can often find a good summary of the article and get a sense of whether the article is likely to be worth reading or not.

Only maybe 1 out of 10 articles or less that I look interesting to me on HN wind up ones that I actually bother to click through. And of the ones I click through, only 1 out of 10 wind up deserving of being read rather than skimmed.

Some years back, there were a couple of "HN Full Feed" type RSS feeds, that would send the contents of the entire linked article, so I could read them without even bothering to go on to the web site.

I valued these services not only because they were more convenient in that it made clicking through and waiting for the aritcle to load no longer necessary, but also because there'd be less tracking of my interests this way.

I also have javascript disabled for 99% of the sites I visit, and am considering starting to use TOR for more of my browsing. It's really nobody's business what I'm reading, and it's a real pity the Internet wasn't built with more inherent privacy and anonymity features.