
YC News Traffic So Far - pg
http://ycombinator.com/ycntraffic2.png
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barrkel
The RSS feed could do with links back to this comments page - Google reader
doesn't show any such link.

That would increase traffic from RSS users, I should think.

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drop19
concur, this would match my usage pattern much better (read interesting
articles from RSS, then bring up another window to read the comments)

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jwecker
Here's what gets me- in the first couple of days there were some pretty good
posts that got _tons_ of marks. There are some users in the top 20 rankings
that haven't had any activity since the first couple of days- like
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=beau . I have to be honest, while the
customer service article was nice, I don't think it would get more than 20
points these days- I don't think any article would.

So I thought there must have been a lot of people using it at the very
beginning- excited and contributing and the karma flowed like milk and honey
and then the novelty wore off and a bunch of people dropped out. I see the
opposite in the graph. I guess the usage of the site is what changed
considerably.

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hwork
It might be interesting to try a decay function on the leader board.

Now, it's probably not cool to take away karma points, but it would reward
activity. Plus, it'll get around the issue of single posters who post a single
ridiculously popular post. They would have their hayday in karma but then
slide back in the rankings in favor of the regulars.

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danw
The karma of active users would continue to rise whilst the dead users stay
steady and eventually get overtaken.

Perhaps a 'most karma in the past week' leader board would work?

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dfranke
Err, that's page views, not unique IPs? If so, then I think I'm about half of
that graph...

Edit: Nevermind, I'm about a 1/20th. I slipped a decimal.

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danw
Come to think about it there is a drop when I went away for a few days...

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danw
I think one of the drops could have been when RSS was implemented and us
junkies didnt have to do constant page refreshes to keep up to date.

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danielha
I used the RSS feed for a little while, but I tend to just leave a browser
window open at yc.news now as I work on various things.

There's nothing quite like the YC tan and orange to really put me in the
startup mood.

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notabel
Interesting...could someone who's been around longer than I have take a stab
at assigning some of those peaks to real-world events? I'm particularly
interested in the peak near the end of February, and the following trough.

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pg
I think it was an O'Reilly blog post about news.yc.

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python_kiss
pg, did you create news.yc as a long term solution or is this something
temporary (just for the startup school and YC applicants)? It's great to see
the site's enormous growth. Unfortunately, there is a good chance the traffic
will drop sharply following April.

*ill still be around, though. YC can't get rid of me that easily*

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pg
Long term, certainly. There are a lot more features coming.

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pg
We got another day's stats so as long as the story was still live I just
updated the url. Here's the old one: http://ycombinator.com/ycnewstraffic.png

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jwecker
Do you mind if I ask how many users there are? Have memberships mirrored the
page requests more or less?

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pg
Oddly enough I'd never checked before, but as of now there are 1426 accounts.
The reddits told me once that about 1 out of 10 visitors there is logged in,
so this seems about right.

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notabel
Do we have any metrics on liveness of accounts? I've certainly felt that the
community of active, thoughtful commentators is pretty small (not a bad
thing!).

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danw
Based on the stats of other web apps I would predict that there are around 140
active users who comment and submit articles. This is however just a guess.

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dfranke
That's a surprisingly low number, actually. The first SFP had 227
applications[1] and I assume it's grown since then. Based on nothing at all,
I'll guess that the average application has 2.35 founders, so that's 533
applicants. YC has been pretty explicit that they want applicants to
participate here.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20050414040411/ycombinator.com/sfpannounce.html

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nickb
This site is so much better than Reddit these days. I don't even check R
anymore (too much noise/politics/pics/videos).

Thanks PG!

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dawie
What tool do you use to analyse traffic?

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pg
wc -l

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dawie
Sorry to sound stupid. What is wc -l? What does it stand for?

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danielha
Prints the number of lines in a file.

