Ask HN: Is Ask HN Shrinking?

4 points | by keiferski 1 hour ago

3 comments

  • Bender 10 minutes ago

    Is Ask HN Shrinking?

    I only have anecdotal information so take what you want from it. If one of my silly blog articles ends up on the front page I get a total of about 18K unique IP's that are mostly only humans which is about the same as I received last year. Not many people would be interested in my articles so take that with a grain of salt.

    When my articles are only in /newest I get roughly ~20 to ~40 unique human viewers depending on the time of day which is down a little bit from last year. That makes sense to me as a number of regulars are probably tired of the LLM slop fest. If I put on my tinfoil underwear I could imagine some concerted effort to use LLM's to drive people away from independent platforms that are unable to filter the slop and/or just get tired of it. Thankfully a number of regulars have stuck around and flag most of it and team dang are doing a great job of automating some of this.

    • cebert 1 hour ago

      Many of the Ask HN posts are lower quality. Additionally, with LLMs, everyone has access to personal research assistant that can investigate questions for them.

      • keiferski 37 minutes ago

        I think the majority of Ask HN questions have always been looking for the opinions of the community, not just pieces of information.

        • chistev 1 hour ago

          Oh, come on. Users have always filtered out the low quality stuff.

        • mikhailfranco 57 minutes ago

          Multi-year web traffic statistics for HN?