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by DoreenMichele 614 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.
1 comments
NavinF 614 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 614 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 614 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 614 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 614 days ago
Where is that 4.1m number from?
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DoreenMichele 613 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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