
Show HN: Hacker News 2018, Year in Review - harrisreynolds
https://chart.ly/stories/hacker-news-2018
======
harrisreynolds
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.

It is not perfect, but was fun to create and I am happy with how it turned
out.

Would love to hear any feedback you have!

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THE_PUN_STOPS
This was a delightful way to show off your product. Kudos.

~~~
harrisreynolds
Thank you! I appreciate it!

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echelon
> 53+ thousand new users

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.

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.

~~~
wyxuan
There are some positive aspects, as it allows for more diversified opinions on
various issues. I find that it is great that there are chicken farmers, bridge
builders, etc on this platform. But I agree. There have been less and less
articles on directly tech relating things, and more on general world news.
Some of the things are important and worth posting, but HN has become a little
bit of a general news aggregator.

~~~
scrumbledober
On the one hand I totally agree, but on the other hand I also really enjoy
reading what fellow HN-users think about the more diverse topics.

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dev1n
I'm wondering how the user _KMinshew_ was the top job poster for the year when
the most recent comment of theirs was from 2014.

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smsm42
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.

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scarface74
Of course death is sad, but we are all going to die one day. The people who
died and were recognized made a meaningful impact on the world.

~~~
smsm42
I don't argue with that, but the overall negative vibe of top 5 is obvious to
me. I mean we could have at least a couple of "this new great thing happened"
there? Of course, corporate mergers may be good news too for some people, so
maybe that's not full negative.

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jamestimmins
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.

Btw minor typo: "discussiom of Karma"

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minimaxir
> 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).

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:
[https://www.kaggle.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-submission-
scor...](https://www.kaggle.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-submission-score-
predictor))

~~~
harrisreynolds
Thanks for the link! Will take a look. Would love to dump our Redshift
instance!

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scapecast
What is it that makes you want to dump Redshift? Sounds like there's a
specific frustration?

~~~
harrisreynolds
I actually like Redshift fine. But we are paying about $250/month for it just
to host this data and if it was already in a publicly available database it
would be nice to drop that.

But using Redshift for this has been great for us in terms of testing our
tool.

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alwayseptember
I, for one, welcome our new users.

But seriously, a couple of points worth discussing:

1\. Moderation feels much more automated, with default rules cutting broad
robotic swaths into (or more often out of) discussion.

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.

3\. Both of these facts feed into throwaway accounts. Thus, " _users_ " are
not all truly users.

The numbers don't tell the whole story.

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jenscow
Interesting how the top 4 scoring posts are about deaths...

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lifeisstillgood
What seriously there are 1/2 million users on here? I honestly thought it was
in the 10's of thousands tops.

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.

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shapiro92
there was a recent study for reddit showing that actually most users dont do
anything and the whole content is generated from not even the 10%

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Zitrax
Would be interesting to know how many of those 500 000 that were active during
2018 (at least one login).

~~~
harrisreynolds
I ran a query using Chartly and it came back with ~138K users that had at
least one post (story or comment) during 2018.

So maybe around 28% or so were active.

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bovermyer
This is fascinating. I love data stories.

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csbartus
Lately I’m reading HN as a replacement for tv and newspapers, for world news.

I’m not saying HN is not fun anymore it’s just the value is elsewhere.

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.

~~~
purple_ducks
Completely off topic but I clicked through your profile (just to see if you
were lobste.rs employee - (cynical I know))

Anyway, on your website, you have a 4 picture gallery with the selectors
vertically at the side but it was a bit jarring as I'm used to those vertical
selectors usually used to display for vertical scrolling.

Even ignoring the above, the photos transition horizontally which is even more
jarring (when the vertical selectors exist).

<unwarranted-2-cents/>

