I totally agree that the metric is imperfect for a long term analysis. I was initially leaning toward a quantile based approach to really focus in on topic trends over time, but when I was initially exploring the data, the relative challenge of having a Show HN become popular in 2025 compared to previous years caught my curiosity, and for this decade I felt a static cutoff provided a simple and easy to understand threshold.
I do think as a metric for total reach, a static cutoff actually works reasonably well. I think some form of square root normalization over total users is probably the best balance.
Thank you! I currently don’t have much insight to this current trend. At the time of this analysis I hadn’t even heard of Clawd but that would definitely be worth my revisiting.
I was planning on doing this yearly but the Clawd excitement is definitely worth diving into.
2016-era HN had its share of negativism, but it also had a lot less people - the light green from those charts is misleading.
I do think as a metric for total reach, a static cutoff actually works reasonably well. I think some form of square root normalization over total users is probably the best balance.
Do you have any insights into the Clawd spam ravaging /new and /show?
I'm in there, being part of a (down) "voting ring" (not coordinated)
I was planning on doing this yearly but the Clawd excitement is definitely worth diving into.