

HN Community is not immune to Recency Bias - hardik

Inspired by links provided by users in "Best HN Thread of 2008" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417782 I tested out how recent the "favourite" threads of HN Community are, here are the results:<p>http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pN6XUWPVqqcQNQNdmpZtVVg&#38;oid=2&#38;output=image<p>Apart from the fact that I have got too much time on my hands, it also proves that hackers also not immune to cognitive biases that "normal people" are prone to.<p>Now some disclaimers:
1) Based on the links in the threads as on 3rd Jan, 13:30 GMT
2) Links by some individual users were uniformly spread over the year but collectively it can be seen that it is not the case.<p>Some arguments against my hypothesis,
1) The test would be itself biased if not quite a lot of commentators joined HN before Jan 1 2008.
2) Same goes if increasingly more stories are being published per day since the start.<p>More info on recency bias:
http://knol.google.com/k/hardik-thakkar/recency-bias/2l6p0gc69rsej/1#<p>If anyone is curious enough, send me a msg with you email address and I will share the spreadsheet (its on googledocs)
======
noodle
compare that to this graph:

<http://ycombinator.com/images/traffic-8dec08.png>

i think its worthwhile to mention the fact that there are a lot of people who
jumped into HN in the middle of 08, so they weren't around to see threads
early in the year. or, another possible effect would be that because the
community was smaller, there were fewer threads or fewer quality threads.

