

Lessons of the Chewbacca Incident - julian37
http://binarybonsai.com/2010/09/27/chewie-stats/

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thehodge
Wouldn't this have something to do with people opening HN items up in tabs and
reading + commenting before moving on to the next one?

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NathanKP
Many Reddit readers use the same reading technique and their time per page was
still low.

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araneae
I recently deleted my reddit account due to an addiction problem, but while I
was on I would open lots of tabs to come back to later, and I don't do that on
HN. I'm not sure how similar my experience is.

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Robin_Message
So, with that graph floating in the middle of the columns, I'd expect to read
the 4 chunks of text top-left, bottom-left, top-right, bottom-right. Did
anyone else find it surprising that it actually reads top-left, top-right,
bottom-left, bottom-right?

Also, if I offered you a javascript library that could lay out columns
properly, on existing browsers, with two-column width floats, would you use
it?

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nirmal
I've been wanting to see proper support of combinations of column-height,
column-width and column-span for a long time. I would definitely be a user of
a library if it could give me these features.

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Robin_Message
Looking at <http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/#spanning-columns> it seems to
me column-span is implemented exactly like the site in question, i.e. _wrong_
from the point of view of existing behaviour (that behaviour being all the
printed magazines and newspapers since we worked out how to mix text and
images.)

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petsos
I don't think the average is an appropriate metric. The author assumes that
everyone found the article interesting, but some people were more lazy than
others. In reality many people could have just followed a link (perhaps
because of a catchy title), found the article uninteresting and never even
started reading it (myself included).

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carlos
Given the length of the article I guess that it's not only the most engaged,
but actually the only ones who read it. I don't believe that article can be
read in less than 5-10 minutes.

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robryan
This is the average though so you can assume people read the article from the
other sources to, just the majority of them didn't where it would appear the
majority of those from hacker news did.

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tptacek
It's not surprising that DF readers are so engaged; if you're a regular DF
reader, you implicitly trust Gruber to promote stories that are going to end
up interesting. There are vast amounts of new stuff put up on the Internet
every day, and Gruber posts only a miniscule fraction of them to his site;
it's heavily curated, more carefully groomed than any other referer on the
list.

IIRC, Gruber specifically called out this article as an interesting read,
which means that if you clicked through to the article, chances are you were
doing it with the expectation of reading a good long-form article.

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jasonlotito
Link directly to the article: <http://binarybonsai.com/2010/09/27/chewie-
stats/>

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nysauhem
From the original, the darker bar is the average time spent on the site, while
the lighter one is the average number of pages viewed.

Shame on boingboing for using a key-less graph.

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btilly
Does anyone have a link to the article that people were visiting?

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timf
It's the author's first link, here is the HN page for it:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714989>

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smackfu
This is the worst kind of pseudo-science, using a single example to make
sweeping generalizations far beyond what the data even shows.

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RK
Can anyone give a quick overview of how viewing time on a page is estimated?

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messel
wonder if tools like instapaper are brought into the mix. I used to worry when
folks would only visit my blog for 10 seconds. Now I just hope they're saving
it for an enjoyable read later

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rgiar
i wonder if this implies that hn readers are looking to kill more time.
procrastinating on the next big startup? :)

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fdb
tl;dr

