

Ask HN: How many HN members are there? - d0ne
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=site:news.ycombinator.com+inurl%3A%22user%3Fid%3D%22&pbx=1&oq=site:news.ycombinator.com+inurl%3A%22user%3Fid%3D%22


======
joejohnson
Why are there so many usernames that are perscription drugs? On the first page
I see Zithromax, Zoloft, Zyprexa and Abilify.

~~~
a5seo
These pages rank at the top of the site: search because they have a lot of
backlinks. Why? Because someone created the profile, then went out and created
links to their profile page (e.g.
[http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnews...](http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fuser%3Fid%3Dzithromax)).
Why? Because they were probably planning to drop a link on their HN profile
page to a page that sells Zithromax.

This is a common strategy on Youtube or really any social site that gives you
a profile page and the ability to drop a followed link. Even if you're
building junky links to your HN profile page, the overall domain authority and
trust of HN is relatively high, so it's a way to launder link juice and create
a quality link to whatever it is you're selling.

Eric Ward wrote about it here: <http://searchengineland.com/social-link-
manipulation-11429>

There's a fairly good sized contingent of the affiliate marketing world that
depends on this link building strategy.

~~~
a5seo
Here's a graph I found explaining the "link wheel" strategy:
<http://lemonarian.com/images/majorwheel.jpg>

~~~
Alex3917
The sad thing is that it's not just spammers who need to do this. Even people
who are genuinely creating great content in an attempt to help others still
need to create backlinks from social sites if they want to show up in Google.
I've made all sorts of resources that are far better than anything else that
currently exists, but without actively going out and building a few backlinks
these pages would get literally zero hits.

~~~
ZoFreX
While the core of what you say is true, I think the overall message, in the
context of the comments above you, is slightly misleading. Yes, you cannot
just create a great website and magically get hits, you do have to tell people
it exists! This isn't news, and "SEO" while much maligned these days is still
a valid, useful and in many cases necessary skill. However, it is not
necessary to engage in blackhat SEO practices and it is far from true to say
that you must build spammy backlinks from social networking sites in order to
succeed. I don't think you mean that it is, but it came across a little like
that.

~~~
prawn
Amusingly, your HN alias sounds like some sort of pharmaceutical product. ;)

------
vaporstun
I'd be interested to see some analytics, such as how many users are there with
100+ karma because that's likely a better measure of the number of active
users than the number of registered users (many of which are likely inactive).
However, that doesn't account for lurkers.

Or, the number of users that have logged in within the past week though this
is probably something pg would have to give us because I can't think of any
way to determine that without the backend data.

~~~
gshahlot
100+ karma won't exactly be a good parameter. I am a regular at Hacker News
for around 3 months now , mostly just to read the content & up-vote the ones I
really like. But my karma has been at 1 forever now, maybe because I don't
comment much, not sure. Still karma does not say much.

~~~
jannes
Yeah, I agree. Karma shouldn't be an indicator of how often one visits HN,
it's merely an indicator of how much one participates in the HN community.

For me, getting karma is not desirable at all. What's the point of it? I only
comment, when I think I have something useful to say, which is not often the
case. I never felt the urge to post just so that my karma increases. I think,
this really reflects the good design of this whole system by pg.

~~~
ordinary
Arguably, silent spectators aren't part of the community they spectate. A bit
like watching TV doesn't make you famous.

------
kno
Take a look at Page 10 of search results :
[http://www.google.com/#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+inurl:%22...](http://www.google.com/#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+inurl:%22user%3Fid%3D%22&hl=en&prmd=ivnsfd&ei=BTowTqaWNMrZgQeJjbHmCg&start=90&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=5c3a26213071fb76&biw=1280&bih=605)

~~~
eric-hu
For those too lazy to click the link:

all search results show "no such user"

------
adulau
It would be really nice to have dataset available for researchers with
username, their posts and their comments. As an example, we could use the
"SPEAR Algorithm"[1] to find expertise in specific domains per HN user.

[1] <http://www.michael-noll.com/projects/spear-algorithm/>

~~~
d0ne
If pg wouldn't mind me scraping the site, in a manner that would not impact
the sites performance, I will write an app to collect this data and publish it
to the public domain.

~~~
yahelc
Can't speak for pg, but you should probably follow the site's robots.txt
file's rules: <http://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt>

It sets a crawl-delay of 30 seconds.

~~~
FaceKicker
wget does this automatically, in case grandparent doesn't know. I'm not going
to try it (because I'm not going to analyze the results myself, so it would be
wasteful), but I think "wget -r news.ycombinator.com" would take care of
this... It will not visit external links without the --span-hosts parameter (I
believe).

------
kmanlives
My account page exists, but I rarely post (4 comments); adding my username to
the google search finds zero results, so there are at least 28,701, and likely
many more than that.

My intuition is that there are many people that don't post at all or only post
infrequently.

~~~
nosequel
I also mess up the numbers. HN has so many ridiculous ways to log in, that I
forgot a couple of times how I logged in (native, google, open auth, etc.) so
I've created four or so accounts now. If I add them up I'm > 100, but no
single user has 100 karma.

------
smiler
Wouldn't it just be easier to ask pg to post the data...

pg?

------
jannes
This doesn't account for users who have never submitted or commented, because
there would be no way for their profile URLs to end up in Google's index. Or
am I missing something? I know that there's the possibility for things to get
into the index through the Google Toolbar, but I suspect that the fraction of
HN users who use the Google Toolbar is quite low.

~~~
msb
Or rarely submit or comment. I am logged in and on HN everyday, but do not
show up. Maybe with this comment I will.

------
spxdcz
Many of the results are 'No such user'. Add 'karma' to the end of the query to
get a more accurate guess: around 11,600

------
d0ne
If Googlebot is doing its job then there are around 28,700 registered users on
Hacker News.

~~~
cryptoz
If someone creates an account but never posts, will there ever be a public-
facing link the the userid page? If not, then Googlebot could be doing its job
perfectly but have a totally inaccurate number of registered users using this
method.

I'm curious what the actual number is now...

~~~
ComputerGuru
Yes, somehow.

See this:

[http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&#...</a>

~~~
robertk
All of those people have posted comments. That's how. If you have never posted
a comment or submitted a link, yet have an account, Google won't find you/

------
niels_olson
Interesting. So, only 522 with over 2000 karma?

------
mcarrano
I would say at best this gives a rough estimate of the amount of users.

I tried searching my own username and it does not appear in the results.

Perhaps I just failed at using Google?

------
die_sekte
The last big poll (the one about hiding comment scores) had about ~4500 votes,
IIRC. Everybody who voted is probably somewhat active on here; and I'd guess
that most active users voted.

------
JacobAldridge
For comparison, pg posted figures on Feb 9 showing 90,000 unique visitors
(timeframe unclear to me, but I'm guessing daily) -
<http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-9feb11.png>

If (as the results of my Google search revealed) there are 28,600 members,
then 90,000 uniques is roughly a 2:1 lurker ratio (almost certainly much
higher, given member!=active member, and not all members visit every day)

~~~
kgermino
True, but don't forget that number of uniques is not the same as number of
users, especially if you aren't logged in.

For example: In any given month I visit HN from a laptop, desktop, and work
computer using both Chrome and Firefox, in and out of incognito mode, as well
as from two different browsers on my iPad and often from other people's
computers. Obviously I am not always logged in to all of these browsers so
depending on how pg counted uniques (my understanding is that cookies are the
common practice though I could be totally off base on this) I could be counted
as anywhere from 3 to 15 uniques a month.

------
Yxven
On a related note, how much of a slashdoting can you expect for posting a link
here? There aren't as many registered users as I expected, but it doesn't
account for lurkers.

When my niche website is finished, I'd like to share it with the hacker news
crowd, but it's not built to scale to a bajillion users.

------
suyash
Google was showing 27,200 results so if they are all valid user id's without
repetitions, I would assume around 27,200 registered users but that seems
pretty low, doesn't it?

~~~
aaronwall
Based on the referrals the site sends (often 4,000+) I would have thought it
was much higher than that. My guess is that there are a lot of lurkers & only
something like 2% of site visitors even create an account.

------
powertower
That's only users crawled, which is the amount of users that have made at
least 1 comment or 1 post -- as there are no user list pages here.

------
tikna
As of 31st May, 2011 there were 67248 HN Users.

Source: <http://hnarchive.in>

------
fenesiistvan
a small improvement: site:news.ycombinator.com inurl:"user?id=" -"No such
user"

------
katieben
I like the guy whose name is user-id (:

~~~
uid
we are not related

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Go back to Reddit.

------
BlackJack
Let's start a count.

+1

~~~
BlackJack
It was just a joke :(

