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Analyzing HN readers' personal blogs

dannysalzman.com

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Re: Analyzing HN readers' personal blogs

#81

Post by oefrha »

jacquesm wrote: post #46
dsalzman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a fair point! I would have to read HN’s terms of use though. Not sure if that’s allowed or not. I felt good scrapping the comments section since everyone there “opted in “ to share their website to the broader community.

You can take it as read that people who write blog posts do that to share them with the broader community. Could one of you downvoters please explain why you think people would post blog posts if they do not want to share them? I fail to see how that would be possible.

I occasionally blog about interesting technical problems I encountered and how I solved them. Someone who have the same problem might happen upon my posts through a search engine, and find them helpful; but I don't see the point of "promoting my blog" to people who're not looking to solve those problems. So the answer to "what is your blog and why should I read it" is you probably should not until you find my blog when researching on a problem.

Re: Analyzing HN readers' personal blogs

#83

Post by NikolaeVarius »

ryanlol wrote: post #58
bovermyer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between acknowledging publicly who you are and doxxing, which I consider to be publicly releasing your phone number and physical address (at least).

>doxxing Where does this strange typo come from?

> "Doxing" is a neologism that has evolved over its brief history. It comes from a spelling alteration of the abbreviation "docs" (for "documents") and refers to "compiling and releasing a dossier of personal information on someone".[9] Essentially, doxing is revealing and publicizing records of an individual, which were previously private or difficult to obtain.

The term dox derives from the slang "dropping dox" which, according to Wired writer Mat Honan, was "an old-school revenge tactic that emerged from hacker culture in 1990s". Hackers operating outside the law in that era used the breach of an opponent's anonymity as a means to expose opponents to harassment or legal repercussions.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing

Re: Analyzing HN readers' personal blogs

#84

Post by BigBalli »

Thank you for putting this together!

Surprising insights: many actually use Google AdSense, nginx over apache

I'd definitely be curious in: PageSpeedInsight (score, load time and size), post frequency/length past 12months, external link density

Re: Analyzing HN readers' personal blogs

#86

Post by geerlingguy »

kristianc wrote: post #11

Interesting to see the high numbers for GA. A bit of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ going on?

I've wanted to dump GA forever, but it was only a year or so ago I finally took the plunge and set up Fathom analytics on my sites. Now I'm happier with the faster load times and the ability to control my own analytics data (though some of it is more limited since no cookies are used)... but I do have one more small VPS I'm maintaining pretty much in perpetuity (eventually it'll move to a personal K8s cluster but resources still cost a little).

The friction is just great enough that most people still stick with GA, since it's already pretty much everywhere.

Re: Analyzing HN readers' personal blogs

#87

Post by floatingatoll »

pcr910303 wrote: post #12
kristianc wrote: post #11

Interesting to see the high numbers for GA. A bit of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ going on?

Probably because there isn’t a good free analytics service that is easy to use (no need for self-hosting) and is able to collect the info that one wants. GA is free, and easy.

“User privacy is only great so long as it’s effortless for the site operator”?

Re: Analyzing HN readers' personal blogs

#88

Post by kick »

crocodiletears wrote: post #74
yawn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason is they don't actually want the "broader" community to see them. More than once I've seen people lament the fact that the "orange site" picked up one of their posts. There are Twitter accounts dedicated to making fun of things people say in the comments here. There are people who wrote scripts that do special things when the referrer to their site is HN.

Can you point me to some of those twitters? Sounds entertaining.

All real quotes:

https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says?lang=ca

I think the threads on imageboards mocking HN are generally funnier, though.

Re: Analyzing HN readers' personal blogs

#89

Post by LifeIsBio »

jacquesm wrote: post #13

Of those who responded to the 'what is your blog and why should I read it' thread. HN is large. Likely larger than many of its visitors realize because the participants are a relatively small fraction of the readership. So HN readers are not necessarily contributors. And not all contributors would plug their blogs in a thread asking them to do so. If you want to get an idea of the HN readership rather than of the HN…

> you may want to start off by scraping all the profile pages instead

Oddly enough, I'm in the middle of this project right now! There are over 600,000 users, and it turns out that many of them use their profiles to share links to things other than personal blogs. I've done some scripting to automate deciding if a link is a personal site or not, but the whole endeavor has been significantly less trivial than I had hoped.

Regardless, I plan on sharing results soon, so be on the lookout!

Re: Analyzing HN readers' personal blogs

#90

Post by krapp »

crocodiletears wrote: post #74
yawn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason is they don't actually want the "broader" community to see them. More than once I've seen people lament the fact that the "orange site" picked up one of their posts. There are Twitter accounts dedicated to making fun of things people say in the comments here. There are people who wrote scripts that do special things when the referrer to their site is HN.

Can you point me to some of those twitters? Sounds entertaining.

#hnwatch
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