I just checked. 25% of all HN accounts have posted at least one comment. That's higher than I thought I remembered.

6% of accounts have posted 10 or more comments, accounting for 96% of all comments.

2% of accounts have posted 100 or more comments, accounting for 83% of all comments.

Happy New Year @dang! Thanks for all your hard work as always.

Thanks for sharing these stats -- seems like HN is similar to other internet communities. 2% covering 83% of all comments is certainly pretty skewed. I do notice a tussle over upvotes/downvotes when making comments that might be against the HN vocal orthodoxy, so maybe that's where the silent majority make themselves heard? Via upvotes/downvotes?

What percentage of uniques have accounts here? Would be interesting to know if commenters are also a minority of total lurkers.

I commented about this sometime in the last year. Let me see if my search fu can dig up the post...

Edit: I was about to plead too much beer, but https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... delivered. This is the post I was thinking of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622983.

Thanks for sharing, that's super interesting! If it's easy to dig up these stats, I'd be interested to know—how does that compare to unique viewers? What percent of page views are logged in? I suspect these numbers would be even more striking in that context.

What's the motivation for creating an account if you aren't going to comment?

Upvoting, maybe.

I used to mess around on here with this account I consider to be a throwaway one. Turns out I signed up in 2018 and I have ~1041 karma! Time sure does fly.