Ask PG: Bursts on HN (the number of users online)

[csbartus]

Could we have a new feature / just a hint how the number of users online are changing a day?

There are many interesting posts not hitting the frontpage posted at the wrong time of the day.

For example there is a burst around 1PM(GMT+2 timezone) when there are many new submissions and heavy upvoting. For sure there are other bursts too important for the "natural selection" of posts hitting mass audience.

[justlearning]

"There are many interesting posts not hitting the frontpage posted at the wrong time of the day"

here's what i noticed - there seems to be a surge of new users since last week or so and not a good "burst" at that. I gather from what I see - these karma conscious users picking links straight from reddit and few friends bring it to the first page.

I still cannot believe I clicked on "you think you are a rockstar programmer"....when i came back - for a few seconds I was hallucinated by the thought - was this HN?

...and of course, when there are no interesting topics on the front page and all we have is links like "are you a rockstar" - what better time to go into long discussions about flag this or flag that. This usually happens during this phase of onslaught of new users (my perception).

when there are a few interesting topics, we tend to ignore/overlook the link baits.

..sorry if my response is away from your question's context...i had a "bad" HN week'

[nick007]

the algorithm for voting should look at the percentage of votes that articles are getting in a given time span to correct this.

also, votes received from the "new" page should have more weight.

[jacquesm → nick007]

> also, votes received from the "new" page should have more weight.

No contest there, the homepage is feeding back on itself.

[jrockway]

My articles seem to do best when I submit them early on Monday morning. People get to work and don't want to do anything useful, so they read my blog instead.

[tezza → jrockway]

monday morning, which timezone?

[SwellJoe → tezza]

I'm certain that Pacific has the highest density of HN readers, by a large margin, but I would think anything that would put it on the page within a couple of hours of that would work.

[jrockway → tezza]

GMT, actually. 2am (US Central time) on Sunday is usually when I finish writing articles, for some reason, and they immediately get upvoted when I submit at that time.

When I submit on weekday afternoons (my time), the articles get about 1 upvote (and then I delete them so I can try again later, heh).

[vijayr]

we could also show how many users are online at any given time, like in forums.