Inflation Adjusted Hacker News

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2021-05-22 19:00:07

The number of points a story has accumulated on Hacker News is a good indicator for how relevant and overall how good the story is. I noticed that the average front page story has a lot more points today than it would have had a few years back. This is very likely a consequence of the growth of the HN community. More people who vote equals more points on average, makes sense. This makes it harder to browse through older stories and gauge how good a story is purely based on the point count.

Based on past data I created a HN inflation index. The index is calculated on the basis of very simple calculations. It's basically the average point count of the top 100 stories of each day. I used a moving average of one year to account for seasonal changes in HN-behaviour.

I made a browser extension which automatically shows the inflation adjusted point score of a Hacker News story next to the actual number of points.