Hey guys! We've been working on an idea of data stories here at Chartly and created this Hacker News story based on data from the community in 2018.<p>It is not perfect, but was fun to create and I am happy with how it turned out.<p>Would love to hear any feedback you have!
> 53+ thousand new users<p>This might explain why my perception of average comment quality has dropped. It's purely anecdotal, but it feels as if the volume of joke posts and "me too" responses has increased well beyond what it was five years ago.<p>Comments have always been the most valuable part of HN for me. It's frankly starting to feel a little bit like Reddit around here, and I'm concerned about the signal:noise ratio dropping any further.
It's a bit depressing that out of top 5 posts, two are about deaths, one about prominent figure retiring and two are about companies being swallowed by other companies.
This looks great! The most interesting behavior reflected here IMO is the folks who submit lots and lots of links (presumably) in the hunt for points. The allure of Fake Internet Points is fascinating.<p>Btw minor typo: "discussiom of Karma"
> It would be cool if we could use the public Big Query data set in Google cloud, but it is missing some data that we'd like to report on. Namely users as well as enhancing the posts with fields like (domain name of a story).<p>The BigQuery dataset has both of the fields necessary to do the analysis, so I'm confused. (you do need to use the NET.HOST function to extract a HN-esque domain name from the url; more info in this notebook: <a href="https://www.kaggle.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-submission-score-predictor" rel="nofollow">https://www.kaggle.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-submission-scor...</a>)
I, for one, welcome our new users.<p>But seriously, a couple of points worth discussing:<p>1. Moderation feels much more automated, with default rules cutting broad robotic swaths into (or more often out of) discussion.<p>2. If HN is this popular, it's leaning closer and closer to social networking platform, with at least one key point: you cannot delete things, but they can.<p>3. Both of these facts feed into throwaway accounts. Thus, "<i>users</i>" are not all truly users.<p>The numbers don't tell the whole story.
What seriously there are 1/2 million users on here?
I honestly thought it was in the 10's of thousands tops.<p>I think it says something about how it is possible to converse with a few people in a crowded room but not notice the crowd.
Lately I’m reading HN as a replacement for tv and newspapers, for world news.<p>I’m not saying HN is not fun anymore it’s just the value is elsewhere.<p>A guess is that slowly I’ll replace HN entirely. It’s too distractive and no essence is captured. Lobste.rs in contrast is a place where I go excited.