On: Reddit’s database has two tables (2012)

[mekster]

> couple posts per minute

There are hundreds of posts that people are reading at every moment. I don't think it's that less.

[oefrha → mekster]

You don't have to guess. Just check https://news.ycombinator.com/new and https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments for everything that's posted here.

Or take a quantitative approach. HN item IDs are sequential. Using the API:

  $ curl 'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/maxitem.json'
  32409711
  $ curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/32409711.json" | jq .time
  1660125598
  $ curl -s "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/$(( 32409711 - 14400 )).json" | jq .time
  1660031940
  

so, 14400 items in ~26 hours, fewer than 10 items per minute on average. At the peak you'll see somewhat more than that.