HN Demographics

Discussions focus on the unique demographics, biases, and characteristics of the Hacker News audience, including its skew toward tech startups, programmers, and YC perspectives, as well as debates on HN's topic relevance and community curation.

📉 Falling 0.4x Startups & Business
7,302
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#3471
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
9
2008
69
2009
206
2010
336
2011
398
2012
438
2013
504
2014
342
2015
304
2016
306
2017
378
2018
334
2019
392
2020
459
2021
647
2022
633
2023
621
2024
381
2025
505
2026
40

Keywords

e.g SV lobste.rs YC HN POV OP UX NOT USA hn like hn startup reddit yc hn just startups ama hn don funded

Sample Comments

sankalpb Mar 28, 2020 View on HN

thanks, can you say more about this? which aspects of the HN demographic do you see as being important to consider here?

zihotki Jun 21, 2022 View on HN

Is HN audience anyhow different?

bbarn Mar 8, 2025 View on HN

The difference is HN is a community curated feed, not an advertiser and for profit curated feed.

fsckboy Dec 30, 2021 View on HN

are you saying HN is NOT populated by regular programmers screwing around who want to sound cool?

anna_bis Sep 22, 2023 View on HN

Not sure if you can really find something like HN for other topics. HN works as it works exactly because of the topic and audience. Same structure might not work for other things

dang Mar 24, 2016 View on HN

HN is explicitly not just about startups and tech:https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

chaostheory Sep 8, 2019 View on HN

HN is less of a broad community than say reddit. Not all, but many of the perspectives are going to be from a tech startup POV

ahold Oct 3, 2008 View on HN

There are much more less-startup-and-hacking-related topics on HN

mbrubeck Oct 11, 2010 View on HN

Some people (like you, it seems) see HN primarily as a place to discuss things. Others see it primarily as a place to discover things. For the latter group, this belongs on HN because they would not have seen it otherwise.

sakopov Jan 28, 2013 View on HN

How does this relate to startups, software dev or anything remotely related to what HN stands for?