

Ask PG: Bursts on HN (the number of users online) - csbartus

Could we have a new feature / just a hint how the number of users online are changing a day?<p>There are many interesting posts not hitting the frontpage posted at the wrong time of the day.<p>For example there is a burst around 1PM(GMT+2 timezone) when there are many new submissions and heavy upvoting. 
For sure there are other bursts too important for the "natural selection" of posts hitting mass audience.
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justlearning
"There are many interesting posts not hitting the frontpage posted at the
wrong time of the day"

here's what i noticed - there seems to be a surge of new users since last week
or so and not a good "burst" at that. I gather from what I see - these karma
conscious users picking links straight from reddit and few friends bring it to
the first page.

I still cannot believe I clicked on "you think you are a rockstar
programmer"....when i came back - for a few seconds I was hallucinated by the
thought - was this HN?

...and of course, when there are no interesting topics on the front page and
all we have is links like "are you a rockstar" - what better time to go into
long discussions about flag this or flag that. This usually happens during
this phase of onslaught of new users (my perception).

when there are a few interesting topics, we tend to ignore/overlook the link
baits.

..sorry if my response is away from your question's context...i had a "bad" HN
week'

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nick007
the algorithm for voting should look at the percentage of votes that articles
are getting in a given time span to correct this.

also, votes received from the "new" page should have more weight.

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jacquesm
> also, votes received from the "new" page should have more weight.

No contest there, the homepage is feeding back on itself.

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jrockway
My articles seem to do best when I submit them early on Monday morning. People
get to work and don't want to do anything useful, so they read my blog
instead.

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tezza
monday morning, which timezone?

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SwellJoe
I'm certain that Pacific has the highest density of HN readers, by a large
margin, but I would think anything that would put it on the page within a
couple of hours of that would work.

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vijayr
we could also show how many users are online at any given time, like in
forums.

