"Btw how did you accumulate your '1 in 10' stats? Off the cuff?"
Yep. Just a rough estimate based on my sense of how many articles I actually bother clicking through to. Having a more accurate estimate of my own click-through rate would not be valuable to me, so I never bothered to try to find out.
"Can you think of a way to measure this?"
If I was interested in gathering such stats for myself, I suppose I could use a browser add-on to measure my HN use.
Alternatively, HN could start using indirect links. But I'm not sure if I'd stay with HN if they started doing that. I hate being spied upon, which is one major reason I stopped using Google, and would probably drop HN as well if they started going down that road. Not that HN really needs to do that, since they already know which HN discussion pages I open and what I write (which are reasons for me to start making myself a bit more anonymous in my HN use).
"Because I don't think 1 in 10 articles 'deserve to be read'. Somebody DID read them, took the time to post them here. So for some audience at least they were meaningful."
It all depends on who the audience is, doesn't it? If you aim for the lowest common denominator, you'll probably get a bigger audience. This is a major reason for much of the mainstream media content being such utter garbage (from my perspective).
Also, just because someone clicked through on an HN link doesn't mean that they liked what they found when they got there. The same goes for tracking of people clicking on "Like" buttons or even sending links to their friends.
People could have all sorts of reasons for clicking "Like" buttons that have nothing to do with them enjoying or even reading the content. And I can't count the number of times I've forwarded unread articles to friends because I thought it might be something they might be interested in, but that I had no interest in myself.
Yep. Just a rough estimate based on my sense of how many articles I actually bother clicking through to. Having a more accurate estimate of my own click-through rate would not be valuable to me, so I never bothered to try to find out.
"Can you think of a way to measure this?"
If I was interested in gathering such stats for myself, I suppose I could use a browser add-on to measure my HN use.
Alternatively, HN could start using indirect links. But I'm not sure if I'd stay with HN if they started doing that. I hate being spied upon, which is one major reason I stopped using Google, and would probably drop HN as well if they started going down that road. Not that HN really needs to do that, since they already know which HN discussion pages I open and what I write (which are reasons for me to start making myself a bit more anonymous in my HN use).
"Because I don't think 1 in 10 articles 'deserve to be read'. Somebody DID read them, took the time to post them here. So for some audience at least they were meaningful."
It all depends on who the audience is, doesn't it? If you aim for the lowest common denominator, you'll probably get a bigger audience. This is a major reason for much of the mainstream media content being such utter garbage (from my perspective).
Also, just because someone clicked through on an HN link doesn't mean that they liked what they found when they got there. The same goes for tracking of people clicking on "Like" buttons or even sending links to their friends.
People could have all sorts of reasons for clicking "Like" buttons that have nothing to do with them enjoying or even reading the content. And I can't count the number of times I've forwarded unread articles to friends because I thought it might be something they might be interested in, but that I had no interest in myself.