

HackerNews exceeds Slashdot in unique visitors - newobj
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/slashdot.org+ycombinator.com/

======
pg
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400939>

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sp332
Not positive, but I think newobj is making fun of how inaccurate compete.com
numbers are, in light of comments on this post
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2399570> and especially TC's take on
compete.com's numbers, <http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/compete-on-compete/>

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andrerobot
Call me skeptical, but I've never trusted Compete's numbers. Their service
gives stats without citing sources, so I don't know what kind of magic or data
interpolation they use.

~~~
redthrowaway
Without Google Analytics to do a 1-1 comparison, any metric will be suspect.
Alexa will suffer from its standard bias of only counting people with the
Alexa toolbar installed, which won't be many for either site. Compete's
metrics are compiled from a variety of sources [1], including a toolbar, none
of which seem particularly definitive.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compete.com>

------
bstar
So what caused the massive Slashdot dropoff? I generally gravitate to where
the most intellectual conversations are (and hacker news is that place), but
Slashdot has been consistently decent for ages.

I will say, Slashdot seems to be mostly made up of a cranky, close-minded
older crowd that fails to comprehend current trends. Maybe it's the user base
that's the problem?

~~~
tomwalsham
Regardless of the veracity or not of Compete stats, I personally completely
removed /. from my daily visited sites about 2 months ago, after 10+ years of
it being my #1 morning destination. I have nothing tangible to pin this on -
they haven't done the digg-style algorithm implosion; their recent redesign
wasn't a gawker-esque breakage which made it unnavigable. It's more
subjective, but here are some of the points I can find which I think
contribute to my decision, in no particular order:

The 1-2 day lag has increasingly become an impediment to the value of the
discussion. There have been comments on /. for a few years such as 'I read
this 2 days ago on X'. 4-5 years back there were few viable alternatives for
quality discussion where those experienced in the field participated, so this
could be tolerated. HN, Twitter and to a lesser extent reddit and specialist
forums have meant the discussion has often already happened, and for /. it's
more recap on topics hand-selected by the 'editors'...

...against whom the vitriol has been rising. While 10 years back the sources
were varied, /. has increasingly become 2-day old metadiscussion on whatever
was getting pageviews on the 'tech' linkbait sites - TC, Gizmodo, etc. This
has trended, AOL-way style away from real tech and more towards
shiny/flamey/'socialmedia-y' puff-pieces. This is a fundamental problem with
not trusting your community to select the stories, but relying on hand-chosen
entries. Not just the lag, but it's too open to skewing/editorial
bias/corporate control. Idle was an early indicator that the corporate
overlords were after this, and even ghettoising it there didn't stop the creep
of topic away from the more hardcore tech which had initially attracted...

...the greybeards. The dotcom boom created a lot of techs. Many had no
experience, and were looking to the older hackers for advice. Now that
'boomer' generation is 10+ years in, and have been developing successful
enterprise and their own communities, they have considerably more to offer.
These communities have also learned from some of the flaws of /. - as
mentioned the hand-selection, but also...

...+1 funny. This is critical. While sometimes HN can appear a little dry, the
actively enforced rule against one-liner witticism forces those of us who are
given to facetiousness (myself included) a reason to pause and hopefully
construct something more thoughtful. This was always an issue with /. - you
never got Karma for funny, which led to the crazy 'insightful' mods to reward
humour. This gaming of the comment system IMO devalued it.

So that's a few things off the top of my head. The primary reason for me
leaving wasn't these per se, but more that I found increasingly that I would
visit and not see interesting headlines, or would read a thread and find
nothing but snarky jibes, meta-discussion about /. and the editors, etc. I
felt this degradation of quality exponentially rose in the second half of
2010, and so around Feb this year I completely stopped going. I am sure I'm
not the only one and this sort of decline is self-perpetuating.

I'm not happy about it - I credit /. with a huge amount of my versatility
these days as a tech, and broadening my horizons on a great many issues. I see
HN in some proto-stages of this decline at the moment, and I'm hoping the
control structure here will allow the community be self-aware enough and
proactive enough to take this experience and make some tweaks to avoid the
negative trends that growth in readership/participation bring to all online
communities (Usenet, /., Reddit have all seen this happen).

Old stories. Less insightful than HN. Lame.

------
gersh
Slashdot isn't what it once was. <http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot.org>

~~~
ascendant
I see stories go by on Slashdot that were linked on HN days earlier. I used to
read Slashdot to get up-to-the-minute tech news. They need to move faster and
get rid of all of the cruft on their page. As much as I hate seeing people say
cliche'd things like "this is 2011, get with the times", this is 2011, their
site design harkens back to their launch and it's just not what I would
consider the forefront of usability.

------
scottshapiro
Quantcast shows ./ has an order of magnitude more traffic

<http://www.quantcast.com/ycombinator.com> \- 21.3k monthly people
<http://www.quantcast.com/slashdot.org> \- 261k monthly people

------
cabalamat
Alexa seems to agree that HN has caught up with Slashdot and is about to
overtake it: <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/slashdot.org+ycombinator.com>

~~~
object404
only non-techieidiots have the Alexa spyware toolbar installed.

That only shows that more non-technically proficient visitors check out
ycombinator and is not indicative of the total number of users.

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masterzora
I don't see anything restricting this to HN, either. Am I missing something?
While I imagine that HN is the majority of traffic to YC these days, it'd be
silly to pretend the rest of the site wouldn't have visitors HN doesn't.

------
joeguilmette
I think this says more about Slashdot than HN...

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Estragon
So, where are the cool kids hanging out these days? I like True Reddit, but
it's a bit slow...

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veyron
why does 'spam "by moultano"' show up as a top search term?

~~~
MaysonL
I don't know, but moultano's HN profile says this:

"I work at Google trying to make your search results not suck."

~~~
nostrademons
He was also pretty active in the discussions about the personal blacklist and
ranking change to block out contentfarm sites.

------
diamondhead
I think it's the eventual consequence of the mutation of the dev community. I
guess and hope that we won't need to create a new website for better community
sharing the content we're interested in. I wish we had a mixage of Torrent and
Github to share any kind of content; article, links, video, picture, even spam
texts...

