There is surely a combination of location and sleep schedule contributing to this, and each have cultural implications: maybe British users gravitate toward certain topics, maybe the best developers tend to be night owls, etc. -- and then you've got folks who use these sites while they work, while they commute, while they fall asleep...

It would be interesting to see some sort of personas-over-a-day graph.

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PaulHoule 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've thought about it. I think of the people who are active in the 11-8 EST window when I'm not active as "the night shift" and I imagine that they're mainly geographically different from me. I imagine it skews towards Asians and Europeans.

Submission time is not such a good indicator of who interacts with a post because a post could be active for 12-24 hours and considering most people are awake 16 hours a day you're going to get people from all time zones. It's probably fair to say that comments written around 2am EST were not likely to have been written by North Americans and the same is true for submissions.

I've done some experiments that involved looking at submissions on days of the week individually or looking at dayparts (say the 5am-6am EST slot) or daypart+day-of-week and never felt I got a much better model as a result.

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mooreds 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Submission time is not such a good indicator of who interacts with a post because a post could be active for 12-24 hours

Posts that make it to the front page are good for 12-4 hours, I agree.

But if a post gets less than 4 upvotes in the first 15ish minutes, my experience is that 99% of the time it won't get to the front page.

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PaulHoule 5 days ago | parent [-]

Every few days I submit one that doesn’t get a lot of traction but I come back in 2-3 days and it is on the home page, I think these are responsible for maybe 1/3 of my karma but well under 5% of actual submissions. I dunno if these got resubmitted but still attributed to me or if it is part of dang’s “a good submission got missed” program.

	▲	mooreds 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		My guess is that those links are added to the second chance pool. https://news.ycombinator.com/pool But the ways of the HN are deep and mysterious, so that's just a guess. This is the best guide I've found: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

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mooreds 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a good point that different types of users gravitate toward certain types of content. Certain passes the sniff test.

Would be interesting to see you could back things out.

I also think there's an effect based on just how fast the new page is refreshed. I sometimes post in the early morning (US MT) and stuff can hang on there for a while (hour or two). By mid-day, it's more like a 30 minute lifetime on that page.