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.

Cool. I think it would be nice to normalize against users (or active users).2016-era HN had its share of negativism, but it also had a lot less people - the light green from those charts is misleading.

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.

Very nice analysisDo you have any insights into the Clawd spam ravaging &#x2F;new and &#x2F;show?I&#x27;m in there, being part of a (down) &quot;voting ring&quot; (not coordinated)

State of Show HN: 2025