Ask Dang: What are some statistics about the HN community?

86 points·behnamoh··11 comments

Like how many people, from which countries, how many actually fill in their email, the average number of upvotes/favorites/submits by people, how many lurkers, etc.

It could be quite interesting to see those trends over time too.

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Dang mentioned the following a couple of months ago:

> HN gets 1400-ish submissions and 12,000-ish comments a day, and 5M-ish users a month.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26867761

After filtering out dead and deleted stories, it's about 950-1000 stories per weekday, and about 650 stories per weekend-day. This is what I consistently see after two or so months of curating HN's 'new' tab for my newsletter.

I'd really like to know the ratio of upvotes to downvote as one possible metric of positive conversation.

I’d like to see best comments within a page. I’d like to sort by controversial too. That’s where the action happens.

Controversial would be interesting-- 20 votes but a neutral karma on a comment would indicate a split opinion about its contents. I always like comments I don't agree with if they also make me really think about something, though I also wouldn't downvote a comment like that.

Well, I like HN because of the lack of feature creep. So keep the mystery.

There is joy in the brutal simplicity of this UX.

Dang, have you ever flagged a comment that was popular but was wrong or offensive? (It's easy to flag unpopular comments. But surely not all popular comments have merit...)

I've certainly downvoted comments that I might have agreed with but were made in a bad way more likely to inflame then lead to productive conversation-- trollish or insulting comments.

I actually think it's kind of cool when things are a mystery

I'd be really curious what's the ratio between US vs ROW users.

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