<story><title>Best of HN 2020</title><url>https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1609415804&amp;dateRange=custom&amp;dateStart=1577836800&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;type=story</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>purplecats</author><text>im still puzzled by the seeming contradiction that sites can get ddosed from traffic from hacker news, yet the comment sections nor the average votes accumulation on posts seem to reflect the size of the community that such a traffic would warrant.</text></item><item><author>simonebrunozzi</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m happy to see that there&amp;#x27;s a &amp;quot;Thank you Dang&amp;quot; in the top 20. He certainly deserves that praise... I am still amazed at how good this community is, despite having grown into a much larger one over the years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Thorentis</author><text>I love this part of it. On reddit, any comment I make is usually drowned out by noise and missed (unless I&amp;#x27;m on a smaller or local subreddit or something). Here, I can genuinely engage in interesting discussions with people.</text></comment>
<story><title>Best of HN 2020</title><url>https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1609415804&amp;dateRange=custom&amp;dateStart=1577836800&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;type=story</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>purplecats</author><text>im still puzzled by the seeming contradiction that sites can get ddosed from traffic from hacker news, yet the comment sections nor the average votes accumulation on posts seem to reflect the size of the community that such a traffic would warrant.</text></item><item><author>simonebrunozzi</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m happy to see that there&amp;#x27;s a &amp;quot;Thank you Dang&amp;quot; in the top 20. He certainly deserves that praise... I am still amazed at how good this community is, despite having grown into a much larger one over the years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>trisiak</author><text>Pure speculation but could it be a network effect? I frequently visit websites that were shared by coworkers and friends over text communicators that they originally found on HN.&lt;p&gt;Obviously, not all people vote or comment either so that&amp;#x27;s a second multiplicative factor.&lt;p&gt;Finally, causation != correlation, which most likely is your point, e.g. things on HN already spread from somewhere else.</text></comment>