

Reddit vs Hacker News traffic - zachbeane
http://www.xach.com/moviecharts/reaction.html

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tdoggette
The visualization here is excellent, and I love watching how a link spreads
through the little ecosystem of linkers of different sizes.

However, I am very concerned about the headline, which suggests that HN is the
most interesting part of this. I fear that posts framed this way are the first
step into the pit of self-referentiality that reddit is permanently stuck in.

~~~
pchristensen
Did you notice that the user zachbeane that submitted the story is the same
Zach Beane that wrote the story and the visualization library? Maybe he wrote
the title that way to make it _more relevant_ to HN readers.

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mrtron
Fantastic visualization of that data. You should release some sort of library
for creating these from Analytics data or however you were logging the
referrals.

I would love to have a page with my traffic displayed this way - maybe over a
few different time scales.

It is always nice to see such well thought out views of data like this, for
movies and web traffic it really seems to do the task.

~~~
bprater
Agreed, you are totally on to something here. It makes it really clear how the
volume changes over time.

~~~
jedc
+1 from me

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whacked_new
Title is inaccurate. While the chart shows it, the linked article is not about
reddit vs. hacker news traffic, nor does it even mention "Hacker News." It is
a visualization of traffic from several sources, one of which is HN.

~~~
pchristensen
But the author of the software and the article submitted it, so he should get
some credit for tailoring his submission.

~~~
whacked_new
I realize that, but it is still misleading. If Eistein said something
misleading in a relativity lecture, it would still be misleading :)

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cawel
Awesome!

With the-largest-the-higher convention, you have a very telling visualization
of the evolution of the streams with time.

And I thought Google Analytics graphs were the best. There's always room for
innovation!

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staticshock
i'm a big fan of nyt's movie revenue graph:

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/2008022...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/20080223_REVENUE_GRAPHIC.html)

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KirinDave
What's so clever about his implementation is that he took the stream graphs
and made the rendering very simple (blocks in columns linked by bezier curves,
most drawing kits make these trivial). It turns out that it's actually an
improvement for lots of different datasets.

It's really a great hack, and I suspect that a lot of people will copy it
shortly. Certainly, I already am.

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herdrick
I really like the design sense here. But the decision to give some whitespace
padding between items (sites, movies, etc.) means that you can't get an
accurate idea of the totals for a given period. Compare to these:
<http://www.leebyron.com/else/streamgraph/>

For the movie graphs, the visualizations are limited to the top twenty-five
movies so it doesn't matter. But his traffic visualization shows all
referrers. Those graphs would convey more information without the whitespace.

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markbao
I love innovative graphs like this one.

Not only does it show both volume _and_ ranking at a given time, but it _looks
awesome_.

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AndyKelley
The most interesting line to follow was Google. It was never at the top, but
it was a snake slithering through all the results, patiently contributing at
least 50% of the traffic.

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jbum
Google trends is useful here:

[http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2Cmetafilter....](http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2Cmetafilter.com%2Cycombinator.com%2Cboingboing.net&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

I left digg off, because it so high that it pushes all the others down into
the noise...

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charlesju
You just blew my mind a little bit.

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45454564654
No offence, but the numbers are simply too low to read anything meaningful
into them. I'm guessing you never even reached page three of Reddit, with less
than 700 hits.

I don't see how you can possibly draw any conclusions from this. For example,
if you'd reached close to the top on Reddit, would the figures progress in the
same way? I very much doubt it.

~~~
DougBTX
The "hits" number is the number of hits in that hour. Move your mouse left and
right, and you'll see he got 376 in the first hour, 565 in the second, 721 in
the next, and so on.

