Percentage 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...
I'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.
(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):
...Although Brits tend to be familiar with "plurality" in my experience, while Americans tend to have no clue what a relative majority is (judging by the downvotes of the GP, it looks to be holding true).
Weighting 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.
I 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.
Funnily 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.
Yes 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.
Interesting 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I'm afraid people are going to start posting information from all the AI tools without human checks for accuracy and pretend they're useful in discussions.
An 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.
I always found this interesting because this phenomenon exists all over the internet (there's even a dedicated subreddit for it: /r/usdefaultism). If you don't make it extremely clear where you're from, for some reason the internet just assumes you're american.
No, it exists all over the parts of the internet that are run by US companies, hosted in the US, and primarily popular with Americans. Nobody is going to assume you’re American on Jeuxvideo.com.
It's quite an interesting defaultism though, it gives us some insight into what people think.
There's this strange asymmetry: ask a non-American to name a US Supreme Court justice, a famous American businessman, an entertainer, a politician, and maybe some other categories that I haven't listed. We all know one, even though it might actually be hard to name the same for neighboring countries like Ireland or France.
Ask someone if they know the subdivisions of the USA, and if they know the subdivisions of their own neighbors. Do I know the mayor of anywhere in Ireland or France? I know the mayor of San Francisco.
The culture of what country is in the cinema, or the radio? Everywhere you go, it's the US, plus a little bit of the local. Check the top-10 lists of any country in Europe to see what I mean.
Well put. Lines up with my comment ITT and my observations on the American side of things as well. There's a strange dynamic where a massive amount of people across the world have some cursory knowledge about the state I live in, whereas vice-versa I'd probably have to look up if their country even has states, provinces, districts, counties or what have you.
I'm a Brit and still describe pricing when discussing online as USD because that's seemingly the "currency of the internet" that everybody seems to understand the value of.
In similar vein: Using two-letter abbreviations for US states that might as well be mistaken for two-letter country codes. For a long time I assumed people talking about CA were referring to Canada...
I used to be bothered by people assuming America as a default, but I've actually changed my opinion on this after doing an online political science course through the University of Nottingham.
The thing I found shocking while attending this course, was that even in a UK university, America was still the most frequent subject of discussion and reference, with the UK playing second fiddle. And then I would read comments as a part of the course from other places in the anglosphere where for instance, they are asked to name the first things that come to mind when they think of 'banal nationalism' and you read things like America's heavy use of bald eagle imagery, the American pledge of allegiance at sporting events, etc.
I've decided that since it seems nearly universal that English speaking countries give America primacy (even in the context of a non-American university focusing on a heavily European oriented subject), that there's no point fighting it. America's cultural hegemony has complete dominance over the English language.
Personally I'm 100% fine with this. US-based company hosting this forum - US quirks (and features).
I only take issue with extrapolating US-specific things to the rest of the world. Case in point: I don't agree with around half of the statements on HN that explain something as "human nature" when in fact it's something that usually just the Americans say or do.
Ironically 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”.
But US-based website of a US-based company, right?
I'm a Brit, so yes, the defaultism rankles, but at this point I've just learned to accept that people write from their own perspective and to not accept that is pedantry.
+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.
How is anyone meant to respond to this? You’re asserting it as some sort of irrefutable fact. It’s not. It’s how you’re choosing to operate. I for one find this assumption frustrating on an almost daily basis. I think less of people that do it.
What would make you say that? IMO that's a potentially harmful assumption, I agree the demographics point to that but doesn't help when this isn't a real-time chat where things like these can be cleared up quickly
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...