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by NavinF 617 days ago
HN is relatively tiny and HN's allergy to video is not representative of the internet.

Just create clips from your video and post them on insta, tiktok, twitter, FB, etc. That's the internet at large. If people are interested, they'll watch the full video.
2 comments
doe_eyes 616 days ago
HN is small as a discussion community, but it is huge in terms of the traffic it generates to top-ranked URLs. There are fairly mainstream publications that optimize for HN, and I have spoken to marketers and PR people who described HN as by far the most significant source of traffic to their sites.

It doesn't necessarily translate to sales or lasting attention, but if you're after brand recognition or SEO, it's great. Spend some time on /newest to see how many organizations are desperate to get a piece of this.

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DoreenMichele 616 days ago
It's not really that small and I don't know why people say that.

Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.

There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.

Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.

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NavinF 616 days ago
- Individual subs like /r/programming are larger.

- HN is ~100x smaller than twitter which is itself not even in the top 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...

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doe_eyes 616 days ago
I've gotten traffic from HN and /r/programming, and the influx from HN is larger. I think it's a function of two things. First, /r/programming is higher-volume (i.e., more front-page links per day). Second, Reddit subscriber counts are not DAU / MAU, it likely includes a ton of inactive accounts.
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DoreenMichele 616 days ago
Yes, it's extremely hard to get an apples to apples comparison of data across different platforms.

I do my best to account for that.

I remain mystified by people who compare HN size as a community to Reddit or Facebook or Twitter (aka X) which are platforms, not communities.

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DoreenMichele 616 days ago
Funny I just looked and Reddit says r/programming is 4.1m which last I checked is less than the 5 million unique visitors HN was getting a few years ago when I last saw stats by the moderator and I don't know what it's at now.

Twitter works completely differently from most platforms and isn't a unified community.

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NavinF 616 days ago
Where is that 4.1m number from?
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DoreenMichele 616 days ago
I tried to edit my comment and missed the edit window. I was looking at the wrong sub.

R/programming is currently 6.5m, which doesn't matter because it doesn't invalidate my statement about the last time I checked.

If you want to claim r/programming is actually larger now, you need a current citation for HN traffic which you may not be able to find.

And keep in mind it's going to be tough to compare because Reddit members isn't actually a comparable figure to MAU, as noted elsewhere.

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