HN is actually quite popular website - SimilarWeb's estimate is 12.6 million visits a month:

https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com#over...

It's more like 150M visits a month.

Edit: 147M in September.

Edit 2: I'm talking about page views, plus ajax requests like collapsing subthreads. If by 'visits' you mean user sessions, that number would obviously be lower.

Thanks! I heard their estimates can be wildly inaccurate, but I didn't think that can mean wrong by order of magnitude...

By the way, I just noticed this:

>Traffic by countries

>United States 36.66%

>China 13.19%

That's wildly inaccurate. When I ran the numbers, China was less than 1%.

Did you notice a drop in traffic when the Great Firewall started blocking HN?

When was that?

Since I'm no longer in China, I rely on GreatFire Analyzer to check: https://en.greatfire.org/https/news.ycombinator.com

According to that data, it started in August, which is also when people started to notice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20599249

(Edit: just noticed you were in that thread. I think it was the first; at least I can't find any others with this search: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... )

The block doesn't seem to be absolute, as some of GreatFire's servers still occasionally get through. Based on previous experience, I guess it's location-dependent, but can't say for sure.