I once ran the numbers for HN and was surprised at how closely they matched this rule. Maybe I'll do it again.
Edit: here are some estimates. We don't track enough to know about distinct users, so all we can do is guess.
The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound.
Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total:
So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but that's another cognitive bias talking.
To add to that, I was wondering earlier today if HN has seen an increase in traffic, this "1% activity", and / or longer visit times now that many of us are WFHing until further notice... I suspect so, but would love to know!
Someone asked me that today. There seems to be a slight increase in traffic, but there's so much fluctuation normally that it's impossible to say, and it ticked down a bit today relative to last Wednesday.
I suspect it's just noise. Perhaps our users are particularly honest and don't goof off on HN while working at home any more than they do while working at the office.
FWIW, I'm not logged in on every device. For example generally I'm not logged in on my mobile because I don't like typing on it. On a work computer I'm not logged in either.
Very. In the numbers above, 76% of page views are from users not logged in.
I was surprised it wasn't even higher, since I remember it as having been 95% in some past analysis. This is more likely because I measured it differently than because something massively changed.
One thing I would like to see is #upvotes/story and #comments/story, both over time. Those might say something about the ‘liveliness’ of the community.
I used to submit more years ago, but it got ridiculous to get votes. I suspect there must be a LOT of brigading to get posts out of the /newest cesspool.
I just try to post things I find interesting and that maybe others would too. And not worry about votes... mainly because as "dang" indicates (in comments above) most hn readers aren't logged in and therefore aren't voting anyway.
Never heard the term "brigading" before... but yeah I see that behavior elsewhere a lot... the regulars who echo-chamber each other.
People who choose to spend their time doing that are, I think, just wasting their time. Since I am skeptical by default a cacophony of voices doesn't convince me of anything other than there's a mob afoot.
Share what you find interesting and let the curiosity and comments fall where they may.
I've looked closely at this data for years, and I don't think so. What there's a lot of is randomness.
It's of course possible that some people are clever enough that we don't even know what they're getting away with. But I can tell you that HN's anti-voting-ring software catches a great many cases. So many, in fact, that we'll often go through that list and remove the penalty on particularly good submissions, because sometimes people were clueless about trying to promote otherwise good content.
Edit: the other thing is that we regularly get independent confirmations that the anti-voting-ring software works...so at least it's not totally off.
The internet feels very hostile nowadays - it seems like there's no end of people ready to take any comment out of context, and misconstrue to start an argument.
HN's guidelines are designed to dampen that. Example: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Of course the existence of guidelines does not imply the existence of guideline-following.
Those are both a bit too bureaucratic to be what the HN community finds intellectually interesting. There are a lot of submissions like this, often from trade journals, and they rarely do well because they lack motivation for a non-specialist audience to find them interesting. Usually there needs to be something tasty to entice the reader in, some hope of curiosity being satisfied. You can sometimes help with that by posting an initial comment in the thread explaining why you personally found an article interesting, especially if there's something non-obvious about it.
I appreciate the feedback. I feel like there is a healthcare revolution taking place that most people have no clue about, especially in terms of interoperability. I am constantly amazed at how few tech workers have any knowledge of FHIR and related technologies, especially considering the opportunities they provide to startups.
Also another one of my links includes Direct which is a healthcare technology that provides secure communication for clinicians that uses identity vetting to ensure the recipient is who they say they are. I wish it had wider adoption.
It's a communication problem. The way those articles are written simply doesn't communicate what's new or of interest there—at least not in a style that HN readers are likely to be open to.
What might work better is writing a blog-style article about each of these: what's new, what's different, why it matters—and then linking to some of these other more enterprisey or bureaucratic sources. If you decide to work on that, or know someone who is, feel free to contact hn@ycombinator.com because we might be able to give some tips about how to structure it for HN appeal. "New opportunities for startups in healthcare" is definitely a theme with a lot of HN juice, if presented the right way. "A healthcare revolution is taking place" is another.
One thing that would help is if the voice presenting this material comes from someone the community perceives as a peer—not necessarily an HN member but someone who could be. When first impressions suggest something dry and managerial, it gets pattern-matched into the same category as rote bureaucratic or industry sources, and people quickly close the tab.
Maybe this will echo out into the empty universe, but I thought I would mention a point that I think skews your data and conclusion. My hypothesis is that the reason you are seeing what seems to confirm the stated rule, is that it is the "1%" (edit: it is likely actually some subsection of the 1%) that controls access and creates immense barriers and a hostile environment for participation. I theorize too that the reason you are seeing an even lower (0.8%) creator rate, is that this forum even more than some of the bigger forums, polices and controls access even more than common.
If you wanted to test that theory the way you did, you would need to find communities of free speech, low barrier to participation, low "ruling class" control and abuse, while still also somehow controlling spam noise … and then compare those numbers.
In essence, what you are confirming and in my mind what the 1% rule describes is really more the effects of abuse of power and control than anything else; hence why we also have a nepotistic, corrupt, kleptocratic, incenstuous 1% in general society that helps itself and it's own in a self-contained and reinforcing manner of abuse and corruption.
I doubt it could ever be 100% contributors, but I theorize and would be large sums of money that the ratio of contributors could be significantly larger if the gatekeeping "ruling class" abusers of their power were able to abuse their power and control.
I am not sure I can identify the best community to test your theory on, but a good start to investigate would maybe be one of the boards of 4chan, likely not /pol, because it has clearly drawn too much attention.
You could make the opposite argument by picking the other number (8%), which would be a very high rate. So the independent variable here is how you choose to see it.
The other problem is that if the 1% Rule has any validity, then this is true of the internet in general, so you can't really meaningfully single out HN. I agree that finding communities that deviate from the rule would be interesting, if they weren't super small. (Super small communities are interesting for other reasons.)
By the way, if you saw the number of times we email people out of the blue about their HN submissions, offering them help with making them more interesting to the community, or simply letting them know that we were re-upping their post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), you might feel a bit less like this place is corrupt and so on. Optimizing for curiosity is the way we try to manage HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Given the demographics, is the 0.8% likely due to HN posters/readers being more at the introverted end of spectrum so slightly less inclined to engage?
I'm not sure that's a good assumption. Introverted users may be more likely to participate in online discussions since they prefer it over in-person conversations.
Hmm. I'm an introvert, and I find I'm less likely to participate in online discussions, mostly for the reason cycloptic mentioned above: online discussions will be read by more people and require extra care (which can be emotionally exhausting, especially on a contentious topic). I generally prefer to interact with fewer people, so one-on-one communication or small groups are ideal. You may be conflating introversion with shyness?
I tend to mix introversion with having an overly active internal thinking process.
I'm one of those people who pause before responding, because I'm thinking through my response before speaking, rather than blurting out the first thing that comes to mind.
I find overthinking a response can also be inhibiting as I can fall into the "do I really need to say that...and now", so I don't.
I would make a basic assumption that most users have either at minimum two IP addresses or three they use for HN. One would be work, another home and at the minimum one would be mobile although I think mobile IP changes as you travel if I am not mistaken and not guaranteed to be static. So potentially more than three but these could be shared among HN users so maybe 2 at a minimum at the very least.
They do change, and quite a lot, which means users often have many mobile IP addresses. However, those same IP addresses often show up for many users, so it's hard to know how the counts shake out.
That'll be me...
Daily one hour train commute, and my IP often changes a number of times as I switch from tower to tower, as well as drop out due to no signal in places.
I also switch between networks as my mobile GSM and portable wifi are different providers.
Edit: here are some estimates. We don't track enough to know about distinct users, so all we can do is guess.
The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound.
Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total:
So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but that's another cognitive bias talking.