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Ask HN: The Hacker News effect

8 points by piers ↗ HN
There was a question asked a while ago if Slashdot was as popular as it was a few years ago and it made me think: does Hacker News have its own "effect"? I.e. if you link to something is it the same as the digg/slashdot effect?

8 comments

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luckystrike
In my opinion, the best thing about HN is the community.

The insights in to the thought process of some of the smartest people around, and sharing of experience and knowledge, helps in overall intellectual growth. Hopefully, this would help in having a net positive impact in some ways in the respective spheres of influence of the people here.

As far as, jump in 'popularity' index goes for any idea/site that gets covered here, i would daresay HN hasn't yet reached digg/slashdot proportion. And it might never happen as well, given that the focus is to keep it targeted at a specific niche.

p.s. Standing and admiring oneself in the mirror for a long time is generally not advisable. :-)

hwijaya
Totally agree about the community.

There are a lot of times i see fellow HNers down-voting comments that are irrelevant and can hold themselves for not falling into the "stupid-war" like what usually happen in other discussion board.

That's the reason i'm here and not in Digg/Slashdot. The community are smart and critical.

hvs
I hope it doesn't. I never liked Slashdot's "personality" with the constant bickering, fanboys, and general surliness of most of the comments. HN is filled with intelligent, thoughtful people and the noise it kept to a minimum. This would be hard to maintain in a community the size of Slashdot. The future is uncertain, but I think pg's philosophy of this site will help to keep it civil as long as humanly possible.
swombat
A full-on hn'ing is about 5k visitors. Not enough to trouble any decent server.

However, most of that traffic is high quality, and provides insightful comments.

If I have to choose between a Slashdotting (100k+ visitors of extremely variable quality) and an HN'ing, I'll generally choose the latter - although being slashdotted is pretty good for your pagerank too.

Alex3917
As a rule of thumb, every 10 votes a submission has is worth about 1,000 pageviews on the linked-to site. There are a bunch of mediating variables though.
swombat
I'm not quite sure where or when that rule of thumb applies... I've had articles that gathered 200 votes, and they certainly didn't gather 20k page views....
Alex3917
Seems to hold for articles with less than 50 votes. Once you're already #1 on HN for more than a few hours there isn't really much extra traffic from staying there longer.
tomjen
Properly not - servers are so much faster now than they where back when /. ruled. It is unlikely that we will ever see the slashdot effect again unless somebody submit a geocites page.