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Demographics of Hacker News by country
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- diimdeep 3y agoYou should filter out IP of VPN and hosting providers(VPS) https://github.com/X4BNet/lists_vpn/ https://github.com/X4BNet/lists_vpn/ and then account for day/night cycle around the world.
- dijit 3y agoWould be interesting to use this post's analytics as a check against that data ;)
- anenefan 3y agoYes it would wouldn't it. :D I can imagine a slightly different representation for this thread Vs one where many couldn't care less if google is being google once more.
- miyuru 3y agoMy country is not even mentioned, and I am pretty sure I opened that post. (My country is situated just below India)
- sine_break 3y agoLess than 5 users visited the page, assuming you are from Sri Lanka.
- esalman 3y agoHow about Bangladesh?
- sine_break 3y agoLess than 5 visitors, B'desh and S'Lanka have equal number of visitors.
- esalman 3y agoThanks!
- LoveMortuus 3y agoI wonder if the demographics are skewed due to Google being a US company, and thus perhaps people that aren't from there show less interest in the topic.
- taspeotis 3y agoNo mention of time zones when their post hit the front page…
- spacebanana7 3y agoYeah that could make a huge difference. Doubt there’d be many nighttime readers from the US
- bilqis 3y agoI would expect that a lot of people didn’t click on that article because of clickbaity buzzfeed-style name.
- yreg 3y ago>The data suggests that the majority of users come from the United States 41.2% is not the majority… Interesting data though, thanks for it. At what UTC time range was the Google Shutdown post at the top of the board?
- sine_break 3y agoSomewhere Between 10-14 UTC
- heartbreak 3y agoSo this post was on the front page from about 0300 to 0700 in California? Yeah, I suspect the results are a bit off.
- sine_break 3y agoNope, It is the estimated time-frame between which that post was the top post on HN. It was on the first page for ~10 hours, starting around 10 UTC.
- dang 3y agoIt was on the front page for a little less than 4 hours, beginning at 10:45 UTC. It was the #1 post just over an hour, from 10:50 to 12:00 UTC. https://hnrankings.info/35553421/ https://hnrankings.info/35553421/ (I'm a bit surprised that you got 30k visitors - that's more than I would have expected at that hour.) That time of day suggests the American demographics are undercounted (not just US but Canada etc. too). On the other hand, your numbers are close to what I found when I did a similar analysis (already 5 years ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 (March 2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444556 (Feb 2018)
- pqb 3y ago> At what UTC time range was the Google Shutdown post at the top of the board? Is there a tool to check this? Personally, I don't know of any, but I saw the article in the top 15 between 10 and 14 UTC time.
- shenman 3y agoWould be interesting to see the visitors by country (per capita) version too.
- samsaga2 3y agoIt would be nice to divide the total users by the country population to see the hacker news impact per country.
- jagrsw 3y agoAn obligatory reminder, esp. for US-based folks, that when creating posts/comments when writing things like 'our country', 'the president', 'here', 'in the parliament', 'the law says', 'everybody here knows', and not specifying geographical details, you're somewhat confusing and potentially irritating ~60% of HN community.
- belter 3y agoAlso don't assume all users are on the same planet or speak English as native language.
- bestouff 3y agoIndeed, as a French I find many Americans are lacking basic English skills. /s
- School-Cotton 3y agoIronically enough, your post is wrong English. You can’t use “French” as a noun in English. Nobody would say “as a French” rather than “as a Frenchman” or “as a French person”.
- School-Cotton 3y agoI try to avoid doing that, but come on, you can just choose not to be irritated by something so minor. (Somewhat off-topic, but in case anyone cares: we in the US call it the Congress, not parliament.)
- Waterluvian 3y agoIf America has taught me anything, it’s that I absolutely can choose to be irritated by something so minor. ;)
- yreg 3y ago+1 for being a bit irritated when I read claims about laws and regulations without any specification of the geographic place they apply to. It happens more on reddit than over here.
- inSenCite 3y agoGonna have to sample more than just 1 post I think
- quickthrower2 3y agoWeighting countries by 1/population would be interesting and maybe more useful to see the demographic. Or to put it another way if euro becomes one country and US splits into states the stats look a lot different but the same people are using HN all the same.
- w-m 3y agoAdding up the percentages from the graph, roughly 25% of clicks came from continental Europe.
- nehal3m 3y agoI don't like that France's color in the chart is more orange than the Netherlands'. Come on fellow Dutchies, we gotta move up one spot!
- esalman 3y agoFunnily enough, my HN account is 12 years old and back then I was located in Bangladesh with no concrete plan to come to the US. The US-centric nature of HN (or Reddit, 8yr old account) never bothered me, rather it gave more context to those post/comment tones.
- sylware 3y agoShould be supplemented with a per capita weighted graph. Yeah, this is a tantrum... sorry... I cannot wait to have IPv6/IPv4 HN access stats too... :P
- neallindsay 3y agoIt's weird how many tools treat Puerto Rico as if it's not part of the U.S.
- tpmx 3y agoPercentage of visitors relative to each country's population, top 20 Switzerland 2.30 Sweden 1.73 Ireland 1.63 Denmark 1.55 Norway 1.48 Netherlands 1.43 Canada 1.26 Finland 1.25 United Kingdom 1.25 United States 1.24 Singapore 1.23 Australia 1.13 Austria 1.01 Slovenia 0.95 Lithuania 0.79 Croatia 0.73 Germany 0.70 Portugal 0.68 Israel 0.53 Hong Kong 0.53 Via OCR/manual proofing/chatgpt population lookup/spreadsheet calculation. I didn't include countries that had less than 0.2% of the visitors because of the error margin caused by the low number of significant digits. Iceland at 0.1% and a population of 370k, for example...
- reducesuffering 3y agoThis is more interesting. Wow that list really barely differs from a top Human Development Index. Look at those top outliers Switzerland 2.30 Sweden 1.73 Ireland 1.63 Denmark 1.55 Norway 1.48 Netherlands 1.43 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_D...
- tuukkah 3y agoIt looks like you're missing Finland: visitor share 0.7%, population 5614571.
- tpmx 3y agoIndeed. (ChatGPT silently removed that row...) Fixed now.
- tommiegannert 3y agoI'm a Swede living in Switzerland, and have previously lived in Ireland. I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from this, but I feel guilty of something.
- distcs 3y agoInteresting to see UK and Germany taking the 2nd and 3rd spots. Is there any easy explanation for why UK and Germany are at the next two spots? Is UK the next hotspot for IT after US? Is Germany too? What about China and India? Does it not have more IT crowd than UK or Germany? Or most of them don't visit HN? Interested in understanding these trends better.
- lordnacho 3y agoI suspect HNers in China use VPN? UK and Germany are also hotspots for startups, with large English speaking IT populations.
- mekster 3y agoWhat amount of Chinese users frequent English sites? Do they have Chinese equivalent of HN? Also I wonder how many percentage of Chinese are capable of sufficiently understanding English to frequent English sites.
- jirpoltlaw 3y agoCyprus, represent! More of a lurker around here, as evident by my karma. I'll be honest, I did not expect my country to even appear. Pretty cool.
- terhechte 3y agoI asked GTP-4 to recalculate the data based on the population of the countries: I did the sorting in Apple Numbers and somehow it botched the percentages. E.g. Iceland (291%) is actually 0.291% but I have no idea how to fix that. And I have to leave now. Sorry. --- Iceland 291 % Switzerland 229 % Malta 200 % Sweden 174 % Ireland 168 % Luxembourg 160 % Denmark 156 % New Zealand 156 % Norway 153 % Estonia 151 % Netherlands 146 % Finland 127 % Canada 126 % United States 124 % United Kingdom 124 % Singapore 120 % Australia 112 % Germany 101 % Austria 101 % Slovenia 97 % Cyprus 83 % Croatia 74 % Lithuania 71 % Portugal 67 % Israel 58 % Hong Kong 54 % Latvia 54 % Belgium 52 % Czechia 47 % Bulgaria 42 % France 40 % Poland 40 % Slovakia 37 % Armenia 33 % Hungary 31 % Spain 30 % Puerto Rico 29 % Serbia 28 % Greece 27 % Bosnia & Herzegovina 26 % Georgia 26 % Italy 22 % Romania 21 % Taiwan 13 % Belarus 11 % United Arab Emirates 10 % Japan 8 % Russia 7 % South Africa 7 % Argentina 7 % Ukraine 7 % Malaysia 7 % Brazil 6 % Turkey 6 % South Korea 6 % Ecuador 6 % Chile 5 % Kazakhstan 5 % Colombia 4 % Thailand 3 % Saudi Arabia 3 % India 2 % Indonesia 2 % Mexico 2 % Vietnam 2 % Kenya 2 % Philippines 1 % Egypt 1 % Pakistan 1 % China 0 % Nigeria 0 %
- Brajeshwar 3y agoI felt that this is more in general trend with most websites, especially with visits from India. Despite being one of the most populous country with "high internet penetration", Indians usually don't seem to visit websites. I know the post's is the data is from HackerNews visitors over a certain period of time -- when it was working time across USA's timezone. Even on my own personal website (I'm Indian), India is like the 4th highest visitor with a hugh margin of difference from USA's visit. It, however, does catches up with USA to my family website though the difference still remains high with the top visitors - USA.
- oefnak 3y agoWould be interesting to see that list compensated for the number inhabitants per country.
- 8bitsrule 3y agoInteresting that Singapore topped most of SE Asia. Gotta wonder what the spread's like across 1000 posts.
- mekster 3y agoSounds natural as they use English as a native language. I doubt Asian people are as fluent in English as European people. Possibly certain amount of numbers from those countries are native speakers living there.
- amadeuspagel 3y agoThere's also a poll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30210378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30210378