

Twitter Users Most Followed by Readers of Hacker News: Updated & Expanded - jeffmiller
http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-followed-by-readers-of-hacker-news
I originally posted this list 3 months ago (July 2010). I've since improved upon it.<p>Now the list has been expanded to 200 people (previously 100).<p>Hacker News usernames are shown wherever possible.<p>I've also posted a link to a CSV file which contains the full list up to 1,000 people.<p>And a cron job will automatically regenerate the list once a week.
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byrneseyeview
This would be more interesting if you added one more column, dividing the
number of HN followers by the total number of followers. @Shitmydadsays has
1.8 million followers, but the people ahead and behind that account on this
list each have <30K followers. Clearly, those accounts (@al3x and @dhh) are
more Hacker Newsy.

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dshah
Agreed, that would be interesting to see.

If nobody else does it, I'll try to crank something out this weekend.

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flipbrad
I don't consider myself a hacker, so am not best placed to pass judgement,
but... it seems like the true hacker ethos is not to swim with the stream, and
yet here is pretty clear proof that hnews has formed its own stream. How many
hackers here check the list and de-follow anything not in the long tail,
fearing getting caught-up in groupthink?

I apologise in advance if this causes offence; stream or not, I still have
tremendous respect for this very high calibre community.

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forensic
>it seems like the true hacker ethos is not to swim with the stream

I don't think so. The hacker ethos is about being clever and hacking stuff.

Hackers don't do things differently just to be different. They do things
differently because they see the world differently. The reason there is a
"hacker community" is because hackers meet each other and say "No shit! You do
that too! I thought I was the only one!"

Like any good community, it's about commonalities.

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flipbrad
absolutely. but groupthink is a well-known phenomenon. hackers are very
original people, and originality tends to get lost in large groups, no?

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forensic
Groupthink is a well known pitfall of any group.

But not all groups engage in groupthink. Organizational psychologists talk
about ways to reduce and/or avoid groupthink in an organization or community.

If you believe that Hacker News is suffering from groupthink, you should
present evidence of that, and then the community could take action to try and
reduce it.

Personally I don't see it. I strongly doubt anyone is deleting people off
their twitter based on this submission.

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andrewparker
Would LOVE to see this weighted by the each user's HN Karma score. For
example, a user with 1000 Karma who follows Harj should be worth more than a
user with 10 Karma who follows Lessig.

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royrod
Very nice. Would be cool to see how people moved up/down since July :)

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DotSauce
I remember when @PaulG joined Twitter he quickly gained several thousand
followers in a few hours via a link from Hacker News. This data is based on
only 400-500 users. I would say the majority of the Hacker News community is
left out.

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maxklein
Nice, I'm on the List. I guess my one year experiment worked.

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tlrobinson
Me too. I'm pretty sure mostly because of the list of Hacker News members on
Twitter I maintain: <http://twitter.com/tlrobinson/hackernews>

Also, I noticed the first time this was posted I got a bunch of new followers.
It's kind of a self-reinforcing list.

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tyng
This reflects what the HN community represent, and we are certainly not all
hackers. Entrepreneurs? Perhaps. Notice a lot of VCs got pretty high up on the
list.

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charlief
The unofficial ycombinator tweet didn't have a link embedded for this
submission.

EDIT: changed official to unofficial, thanks riklomas

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riklomas
Ah, that's my fault actually, it occasionally chokes on punctuation
(especially ampersands), I plan to fix that this weekend. It's not an official
Y Combinator twitter feed by the way, it's just something I knocked up in my
spare time.

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roadnottaken
Nice hack. Very good idea. I keep wanting to give Twitter a whirl but I never
know who to follow, thanks.

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hubb
i'm a little surprised steve blank is so low. his blog entries are usually a
great read

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yatsyk
nice, added to <http://hnresources.com/hackernewsers/>

