Well I think my MBA-google submission was pretty good. Sure it's short, but there's a lot being said in that sentence... and coupled with the 1984 MSFT article, I think there's lots of information that only this community has with both near the top at the same time.
I agree that the rise of the "MBA-google" submission was significant. I've been impressed by the complexity and sophisitcation of the content that suceeds YC news. Such high quality content is diluted on most other social news sites among a lot of "funny ha ha" articles.
Maybe (probably!) I'm taking this way too seriously, but facile content seems like the biggest enemy of quality on a site like this.
Also, nothing against far33d for posting this, it's clear that he saw a level of depth and value in this that I didn't. And it's clear from his other posts and comments that he takes content/value seriously. I just thought this was an interesting case study.
He he, sorry - didn't mean that example as a dig against you at all. I was just pointing out the contrast in what I think would be popular (given my own limited experience and interests) versus what the community values.
I'm just messing. I've been marveling at your blast up the leaderboard the past 2 weeks, I almost posted a discussion titled "WTF is up w/ nanobeep's massive rise in karma"
All good ;) Yeah, the karma blast was just an experiment, now that it's over, you should see my momentum slow down quite a bit and me get passed by other guys on the leader board :)
I don't have enough stats from this post to really tell yet. But when I posted the notes for PG's investor talk in april it was #1 for awhile and the spike in traffic looked like this:
I mean do many more people now visit your blog because you are at the top of the leaders ranking -- even at times when you have not posted something that made it to the front page in a while?
Well, I have seen that my user-sessions on the blog are pretty consistently about 200-300 per day. It actually hasn't changed noticeably as I've moved up the leaders list. I only got a big spike when one of my posts was popular on YC.News. Other than that, my traffic has looked pretty much the same. I also have to factor in that since my free time was working on YC.News, I was no longer writing my own articles - which of course is detrimental to growing blog traffic ;)
