
HN is 6 today.  Here's traffic since the beginning - pg
http://www.ycombinator.com/images/hn6.png
======
staunch
I created my account exactly 6 years ago, on February 20th, 2007. I guess I
must have seen that announcement[1] posted on Reddit[2].

It's definitely lost that small town charm, but given how much it has grown
it's still remarkably good.

To another 6 years!

1\. <http://www.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html>

2\.
[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/15gkq/startup_ne...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/15gkq/startup_news_ycombinator_enters_the_social_news/)

~~~
pshin45
I'm new to HN and think it's an awesome forum, but the fact that people like
me (non-hacker who wishes he could understand even half the stuff discussed
here) are finding out about it probably means that it's left behind its early
adopter phase for good and is now in "early majority" mode, for better or
worse.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle>

I'll try not to lower the bar too much... :P

~~~
flatline
The internet has really been on a downhill course since September, 1993, with
all the newbs:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September>

~~~
pshin45
I like StarCraft and I love analogies so how's this for one:

People who originally built and pioneered the Internet were the Xel'Naga, the
original users of the Internet pre-September 1993 are the Protoss, and all the
newbs who have flooded the Internet since are the Zerg.

And then you have Terrans like me who are fragmented, caught in the middle,
and have to choose sides. I choose to protect and fight for the Internet.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Races_of_StarCraft>

------
pg
Here's the first month: <http://www.ycombinator.com/images/news.yc.1month.png>

~~~
nbashaw
How'd you spread the word at launch?

~~~
pg
<http://www.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html>

The site was originally called Startup News. We changed the name and focus
about 6 months later:

<http://www.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html>

~~~
d0m
Ha, wow, thanks for sharing. For some reasons, I thought hacker news happened
before you guys started funding startups. Please feel free to share other
documents from the early YC or HN.

------
hdivider
Congratulations, everyone =)

Keeping a community like this together and preventing its degradation over a 6
year period is a remarkable achievement.

Let's also remember that this isn't just a site that lists current topics of
interest; there's also the search feature. It's a great source of links to
interesting views on various topics. For instance, whenever I encounter some
tech-related topic where scepticism or additional information is hard to find,
I search for HN threads on that topic and very often find more detail than I
know what to do with.

~~~
sharkweek
As someone who is a heavy redditor -- I remember one of my first comments here
got downvoted pretty quickly as it was just a snarky, "meme-like" comment that
I learned pretty quickly had no place here on HN.

I've appreciated the strict distinction between the two communities, both of
which have been extremely enjoyable for varying reasons.

------
jasonkester
I found this place in the referrer stats for one of my blog entries (45 days
after this place was launched, it seems). The discussion on my articles here
here was so much more constructive than it had been for the same articles over
on Reddit that I started checking back more and more often, eventually just
giving up on Reddit entirely.

Funny thing that I didn't notice at the time: The article in question was
submitted by "pg". Wow!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389>

~~~
gala8y
_The article in question was submitted by "pg". Wow!_

Confidence of having all this stuff available, because someone running the
service really cares, is part of HNs charm. Discussion and people are main
reasons, of course.

HB HN! Happy 6th Birthday!

------
aashaykumar92
In the past year, unique IPs seem to be increasing while the number of page
views has only increased slightly.

Quick analysis would be that HN is continuing to attract new people to the
site, but people aren't surfing within HN as much. It makes sense given the
assumption that most people probably surf the HN front page as those are where
the more relevant stories are showcased and then post articles from time to
time.

From another perspective, people are decreasing their engagement with HN. They
may not be wandering into the "Ask", "New", or "Jobs" columns.

Just thought I'd share some quick statistical analysis that went through my
head when looking at the graph...nonetheless, Happy 6th Birthday HN! It's
remarkable at how quickly its grown and moreover, how it has remained a
resourceful tool to so many people!

~~~
tlb
I found it hard to be sure squinting at the graph, so here is one including
the ratio: <http://www.ycombinator.com/images/hn6ratio.png>

One trend over the last couple years is more people checking from multiple
devices -- more IPs for the same page views.

Another macro change in the last couple years is blogs linking to an HN
comment thread. Those links often bring one page view & one IP.

Spikes in page views without a corresponding spike in IPs in the early years
are due to crawlers.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
That seems to me a fairly consistent ratio of 10 pages per ip (per day). So
your conjecture is we have doubled the number of pages each person views but
doubled the number of devices viewed on too, so no overall change to the
ratio.

Is there any way to see growth of registered accounts over time - it might
serve as a proxy for "lurkers" and might indicate the proportion of actual
people to unique IPs? Ie if accounts has grown half as fast as uniq IPs it's
reasonable to assume we all have two devices and look at twice as many pages.
If it's a similar growth pattern, we spend less time on HN.

(of course if you track accounts and IPs that would help more:-)

------
atuladhar
Whenever there's a tech-related thing (product, framework, company, or what
have you) I need to know more about, one of the first things I do is google
"site:news.ycombinator.com <thing>." Almost always fetches a lot of insightful
content that I doubt can be found anywhere else as quickly.

Happy birthday HN!

------
bane
Congratulations! It's my absolute favorite community on the internet and an
invaluable resource. Thanks to pg and everybody involved in providing it!

------
gruseom
Is it just me, or has the worrisome rise in incivility here begun to taper off
somewhat?

Edit: if I'm right about that, then actual incivility has tapered off just as
the _reputation_ of HN for being mean and uncivil has escalated.

This whole thread is Meta Carnaval so one gets to indulge whatever meta
commenting tendencies one normally ought to repress!

------
zbruhnke
I have the same birthday as HN ... only problem is I'm 20 years older and
apparently its already accomplished more than me lol.

Happy Birthday HN and thanks pg for giving us a great place to hang out

~~~
Smudge
Happy birthday :)

------
samuellevy
What happened in mid-July last year? A massive spike in page views, it seems,
for what looks like about 2 weeks.

~~~
pg
A very aggressive crawler.

~~~
rehack
Hi,

    
    
      Perhaps you should post the stats, after subtracting out the bot visits, from the stats. 
    
      For our daily stats we do that. Also (internally) report the bot visit counts. For example yesterday we had: 
    
        Bot name 	No. of visits
           User-Agent=Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html),	95000*
           User-Agent=Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm),	700*
    

* - the last few digits have been rounded off

Edit: For display

------
iblaine
HN has replaced /. for me. Thanks for filling that void.

~~~
heyyeah
now if only I could save/upvote stories on HN. Does anyone else have this
issue?

------
tokenadult
"Most forums degrade over time, but we don't think that's inevitable. We're
determined to keep this site good, because we use it ourselves."

<http://www.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html>

Keep up the good work.

------
owyn
Wow, I joined almost 4 years ago... I went from slashdot (3 digit ID) through
a totally non-productive fark/digg phase to here. I guess I missed the reddit
bandwagon although the company is based in the same building I work in now. :)
I prefer the tech focused sites and not the general "cool stuff" sites, and
while sub-reddits meet that goal, I guess there's too much "other" stuff going
on there which is a distraction.

Even after 18 years in the software building biz (as a developer) I still have
so much to learn, and one of the things about this site is that I'm exposed to
new technology and programming languages, great presenters and ideas. I still
want to be doing this in another 20 years and I feel like the stuff I see on
HN really helps keep me motivated (despite the distraction at times, which I
mitigate by running through an HN rss feed filter that only shows posts with a
certain number of points or more). For example, right now I'm reading about
Kanren. :)

------
carlosaguayo
I'd be interested in knowing what news triggered the spikes in traffic.

It's also interesting to see how traffic seems to come mostly from weekdays.

~~~
sbarlster
For myself its an intelligent distraction between server re-starts and waiting
for compilations etc. Don't do so much of that stuff at the weekend.

------
pkamb
Can anyone annotate the big spikes?

~~~
mutagen
That was my first question, what are the occasional big spikes (not the
weekend drops in traffic)? Interestingly, spikes in page views and unique page
views do not correspond well, although sometimes they're slightly offset from
each other.

------
S_A_P
Happy Birthday HN! Despite the complaints I see here every now and then that
the content is going to hell and becoming another reddit, I dont think there
exists a better site that can both simultaneously waste free time and make you
better informed. :) I don't think I can remember a day that I haven't visited
at least once.

Here's to 6 more! CHEERS!

------
edouard1234567
What happened between July and Aug 2012? where we see a spike in #page views
followed by a spike in #unique IPs?

~~~
narsil
Apparently it was a crawler: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5254877>

------
ComputerGuru
I wonder how many people from the 1st year of HN are still active commenters
today? I wasn't here from the start, but did get in pretty early (in the first
year?); I've seen many names come and go! But in the early days, I did not pay
too much attention to the usernames....

~~~
gruseom
I miss menloparkbum.

~~~
Alex3917
Also dfranke, byrneseyeview, and jwecker. For the first year it was basically
all the same 20 or 30 people.

~~~
ed
And of course nickb!

------
GuiA
Happy birthday!

The answer to this question is probably evident to some, but I have a hard
time figuring it out: what causes the regular spike+drop which seems to occur
3-4 times a month? Is a certain day of the week a "dead day" (maybe Sundays)?

~~~
minimaxir
Saturday and Sunday. It's typical seasonality.

~~~
phryk
So basically just about everybody is reading HN only at work. Procrastinators,
ahoy!

------
ryanb
Looking at that growth, I can only imagine how many startups were launched
because of HN. HN played a huge role in convincing me to quit my corporate job
and join a startup, and then later start my own.

~~~
sbarlster
Would you like to share what that startup is? I am genuinely interested as I'm
about to start a new venture myself after being inspired by HN.

~~~
ryanb
Tutorspree.

------
bigiain
And here we see a completely typical "overnight sensation".

(interesting number - if that 6 years represents 6 years of ~30hr weeks, HN
has just hit the magic "10,000 hours of practice" required to become an
expert…)

------
dschiptsov
What is really exciting about this site is its code. It is just about a couple
of megabytes of Arc, _together with the language compiler_.

It remarkable, that this very site is a proof of the ideas and concepts
described in "On Lisp". It is not just works, it creates that much value.

Information and old code - <http://arclanguage.org/>

When you see it, you, perhaps, would look at all that piles of meaningless OO
crap differently. _Just about a megabyte of code_ and _"good-enough"_ design
decisions.

------
sergiotapia
I can't remember how I found HN, but it has hands down affected my life in a
positive, tangible way.

Here's to another 6 years of awesome links, insightful commentary and no-
nonsense commenters.

------
habosa
What exactly causes the "...up down up down up down..." pattern. I'd think
day/night but I don't think the graphs have multiple points per day.

~~~
GuiA
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5253862>

------
AndreasFrom
Here's Hacker (Startup) News from 6 years ago:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombinator.com/)
<http://i.imgur.com/ok2p05b.jpg>

------
paul9290
I came here in may or june of 2007. Was led here via watching Justin.TV when
that first started; launched my first start up there, yet back then I had zero
technical skills. Tough to do a start-up when you don't know how to code,
especially back then in my area.

Overall I been an avid(addicted) read since - thanks!

------
dude_abides
Are the pageviews and unique IPs per day?

~~~
tlb
Yes

------
petenixey
It's a good lesson for overfunded startups to see what one PG achieved
compared to the multi-million dollar, multi-person implosion that was Digg.

Keeping a relentless focus on scaling value and utility rather than spend and
headcount is a much more sound way to build long term value.

------
TeeWEE
Does this include the hacker news api? Since i'm using my phone a lot to
checkout hacker news.

------
duck
Looks more like it was yesterday. A happy belated birthday. :)

<http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#29apr09>

------
logn
Maybe to celebrate future birthdays, only members who were here during the
first 2 years can post on the anniversary... before it hit the "terrible 2's".

------
ikassinopoulos
it's funny seeing how traffic drops during weekends :)

Happy Birthday HN!

------
dm8
There was sudden spike in traffic (both unique IPs and pageviews) in the
months of July-Aug last year. I'm curious to know what caused that spike?

~~~
cstrat
Yeah there are a few stand outs on the graph... would love to hear what caused
them. \- Dec 2011 \- Jun/Jul 2010 \- Aug/Sep 2009

------
brandonhsiao
This is not specifically related, but I've always wondered: why does traffic
rise and fall periodically on practically every popular website?

~~~
mctx
Lunar phase

~~~
brandonhsiao
What has that to do with anything?

~~~
mctx
I don't think your question is answerable - traffic depends on a huge number
of factors, many of which are human or random. Lunar phase may very well be a
minor factor.

------
icey
Happy birthday HN! (and thanks for building it, PG)

------
HadiAsiaie
Shouldn't unique IP be unique cookie? Because IP is not that much unique, two
people can have the same IP and both surfing hackernews.

~~~
jacques_chester
Lots of people read HN without creating accounts.

Quite a few people hit HN as part of a Google search.

One of my blog posts gets a steady stream of visitors every day from people
looking for comparisons of Chef, Puppet and cfengine; they come across from a
link I made in a HN thread.

------
sthatipamala
Happy birthday, HN! It would be neat to load this data into StatWing (YC S12)
and let the community explore trends and such.

------
argumentum
Wow .. show's that long term tending of a community could be more valuable
than techcrunching etc ..

What will HN's stat's be in 10 years!

------
taylorbuley
I keep coming back and hoping to find the original dataset in CSV format.

I suspect some interesting seasonality at the hourly level.

------
codex
Does YC keep any metrics regarding submission and comment quality?

~~~
panacea
Quantitative vs. Qualitative

------
hakaaaaak
Any idea what the peaks in July last year were due to?

------
sethbannon
Up and to the right.

------
justhw
Congrats HN

ps: any way to recover old username with no email on file.

------
dinkumthinkum
Congrats! :) It's my most visited site.

------
run4yourlives
2193 / 365

Ah damn it. What have I done with myself?

------
anovikov
Absolutely shitty chart, it must have points for weeks not days (because of
the obvious weekly cycle) and be log scale.

~~~
halter73
The axes are labeled. You can tell from the horizontal scale that you're right
about the regular peaks being weekly. The charts are not using any log scales
however.

~~~
anovikov
Yes i mean that: there is no useful information in seeing these weekly spikes,
and having points for days rather than weeks makes chart uselessly wide. Just
averaging data in weekly intervals will make the chart way smaller and more
readable.

------
rakeshsharmak
Happy Sixth Birthday!

------
spoiler
Happy birthday HN!

------
AdamTReineke
pg, do you have browser version stats?

------
jasonwilk
Congrats PG

------
ImprovedSilence
slow weekends, eh?

------
huhsamovar
ax.grid(True)

------
suyash
The graph is poorly designed, someone got to be too lazy to leave out the
YEARS from the X-axis.

~~~
autotravis
You want your money back or for someone to get off your lawn?

~~~
suyash
both

