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.