Dang, that's a ton of upvotes for the first day. HN really had a leg up at the beginning. I bet a lot of reddit clones never get half as many users as HN had at the start.

Funny to see everyone's username green because their accounts were just created. Although I see a few accounts that were created months before launch. Maybe there was internal usage before launch that wasn't archived.

Edit: ha, I see the internal usage was archived after all. Here's the real first day, pg's account creation date: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09 Seems like it didn't catch on internally and usage died out after a few days, and then there's pretty much nothing until the public launch.