Deeply technical stories might get up to about 5K visitors from HackerNews (“HN”) and 10K from reddit/r/programming (“proggit”)

Deeply controversial ’Cogs Bad’ -type posts still get under 10K from HN, but can get 40K+ from proggit

Hacker News is a much stabler community; if you have posted stories in succession, the same 5K+ visitors coming back each time

Reddit is a flash crowd; they claim 350K+ subscribers, but that number doesn’t mean much; very few clickers on any given story are repeat

If a story gets on the front page of both at the same time, you get might get more people from HN than proggit

But the story dies a lot sooner on HackerNews; proggit can keep people streaming in for a whole day

Being very top spot on HN is a dramatic visit booster; you can watch in Google Analytics Real Time the sudden influx of visitors when you get sorted to top; and then a trickle again as you drop to second place; Google Analytics Real Time is gamification for blogging

Google Analytics doesn’t count people using noscript (when there are so many technical avenues they could pursue instead)

Very very few people who read a blog post go back to the link aggregation site and vote on it:

About 100 to 1 visitors to points seems about right; if a story has 100 points, its likely 10K people read it. That’s right; two orders of magnitude!

West coasters up-vote less than Europeans; maybe they are busier? Or my content is more pleasing to Europeans?

The per-page time is actually quite high; often over 5 minutes on average for a lot of my stories even when its a big crowd. I suspect some subtle misreading of Google Analytics on my part, or else people might actually be reading the whole thing carefully!?

I speculate that most HN readers are not actually logged in

Most compliments are never given:

If someone likes a post, they probably say nothing

A comment on the blog is going to be very polite and constructive

A comment on HN is going to be mature and reasoned; often expanding or exploring technical issues raised

People comment on proggit to complain about a story

Never bother mentioning Haskell. That crowd has this circular argument going ;)

Its lovely to read the tweets:

A tweet is the biggest compliment of all ; 140 chars to summarise the post really makes it obvious that the tweeter groks it; and its almost never negative

; 140 chars to summarise the post really makes it obvious that the tweeter groks it; and its almost never negative Nobody actually follows the links in tweets though; click-through is often in the low digits per tweet

This is like search-engine-optimisation; now go shower!

The ideal proggit time is Sunday daytime in the states; it gets to the top for Europe’s Monday, and is still up there for stateside Monday

The ideal HN time is a weekday European afternoon; discerning European votes can get the post onto the front page in time for a stateside morning

Proggit, stories get stuck in spam filters. Then it often gets mercilessly down-voted by people not leaving comments and so it dies

On HN, stories start in the ’newest’ fire-hose; the click rate here is in the low double digits, but these early-clickers are far more likely to go back and up-vote, so a story can gather the 3 or 5 votes it needs to get on the front-page. Once on the front page, its onwards and upwards

Naturally, I turn to technology to tame coder social ills: self-organising link aggregation.

Meta:

as seen on HN

as seen on reddit (not proggit yet)

need I repeat that thing about how sad it is that nobody up-votes things they like reading? ;)

Notes

"share"