HN Popularity Contest
Methodology
What counts as a personal blog?
- I count a site as a personal blog if:
- the site contains written content (not just an app or a video)
- the site is authored by a single person
- A blog still counts as a personal blog even if the blogger is a professional journalist (e.g., Brian Krebs) or blogging on their company’s website (e.g., Raymond Chen).
- Social media (Twitter / Mastodon) doesn’t count as a personal blog.
- Podcasts websites count as blogs if they’re hosted by a single person and are independently owned.
- I exclude github.com links even though some people post blogs there.
- It’s too hard to filter out all the non-blog links to github.com.
- Pages under the
github.io
domain are eligible.
Aggregating scores
- I aggregate scores across all submissions that received a score of at least 20 and are not dead or deleted.
- e.g., If a single link was submitted 100 times and never scored at least 20, none of those submissions would increase the aggregate score for the domain.
- Duplicate submissions of the same URL all count as long as each submission received at least 20 points.
- I aggregate together domains when the author moved domains as long as the new domain is the canonical URL for the old content.
- e.g., all submissions from
christine.website
count towards xeiaso.net
, their new canonical URL.
- I do not aggregate together blogs by the same author at different domains if they contain distinct content.
- e.g.,
kalzumeus.com
and bitsaboutmoney.com
count separately, even though Patrick McKenzie is the author of both.
Generating bios and topics
- I created the bios and topic lists with a combination of LLM generation and manual fixes.
- Generally, older and more popular authors have more accurate bios.
- I manually inspected the top 100 in the most popular views, but I probably missed some mistakes. I accept corrections on the Github repo.