A huge chunk of reddit links are back to reddit, to imgur and to things like major newspapers and youtube. If only a few of these are not actually tracked by Woopra, the results would get skewed significantly.
Then for the few legitimate remaining articles, I'll postulate that reddit users go to comment after only reading the headline and never follow the link of the article. Maybe HN readers are more diligent and do read/visit the articles more often.
that's just the front page though. Reddit has a ton of subreddits...which people subscribe to. When they do, the stories from that subreddit show up on your main page.
Maybe a bias in who installs their measurement tools. One huge programming or startup site (techcrunch?) might be skewing the numbers towards hacker news, which could believably drive more tech-news readers than reddit.
Indeed. Speaking as someone who has had several articles at the top of HN and reddit-programming, as well as several on proper reddit as well as digg: it's total nonsense. I'll get 5-10k hits, for a "decent" HN story, I'll get 20k+ for proggit. For a #1 HN story, I'll get maybe 20k hits, and 40k+ for a #1 proggit.
Top-level front-page reddit is pushing 100k.
Here's an example of the traffic of a recent article that got both HN and proggit: http://imgur.com/TpQ5T Obviously, n=1 here, but this pattern repeats all the time.
There is less motion on HN vs. Reddit. You'll usually get up to 3 full pages of new stories a day on Reddit (depending on the number of subreddits you subscribe to) and there is also a fracturing of the community around subreddits. HN is one single stream of content that has many stories on the first page for the entire day. Essentially, HN is a subreddit to itself.
That shouldn't matter, they are just measuring pure volume on the other side. HN users may read more stories than Reddit users, but I wouldn't assume that.
A huge chunk of reddit links are back to reddit, to imgur and to things like major newspapers and youtube. If only a few of these are not actually tracked by Woopra, the results would get skewed significantly.