Hacker News Reader

Comment by crankylinuxuser | Hacker News Reader

It's called groupthink. And I've heard many people outside the SV scene complain precisely about SV groupthink issues.

They can be good ideas, bad ideas, horrendous ideas... Regardless, if SV thinks its good, then it passes muster here.

I've said quite a few things that have either scored low or negative, even if they sane and cogent and direct. They just challenge the precepts that are held holy in the 'Valley.

View on HN

The HN community is overwhelmingly not in SV. Less than 10% by many measures.

Do you folks have any anonymized demographics data? I’d love to see it over time in particular, since I’m guessing early on it was much more SV. When I travel and am in a vastly different time zone (like say to Europe or Asia), I notice the active participants on HN are fairly different. Is 10% by viewership, accounts, activity, all of the above?

I was just looking at this. 5% of "users" (it depends how you define a user who isn't logged in) last month were in SV. A third were in the US, a third in Europe, 8% in Canada/Australia/NZ, 6% in India, 3% in China.

That is the distribution of everyone who hit the site last month at all, regardless of how much they used it. If we weight the numbers by the number of days they used HN, then US has 44%, Europe 33%, Can/Aus/NZ 8%, India 3%, China 2%. And Silicon Valley is 8%. That's surprisingly low, given how many people assume that HN == SV.

That's way more Europe MAU percentage than I was expecting. Thanks, and good to know!

> I've said quite a few things that have either scored low or negative, even if they sane and cogent and direct

You may not be the most unbiased judge of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com