I suspect most people linger and never bother creating an account. My own account is 103 days old, but I've been RSS subscribing to HN for about... 3 years? Maybe slightly longer.

I read a lot of what's being discussed on HN, but I barely participate.

Partly this is down to me fully accepting most of you know more about nearly everything than I do, and sometimes people can be a little unforgiving in reminding others of that. Partly because a lot of the time, I find I can get the information I want from a discussion by just through what others have discussed.

I didn't answer the poll. I did look up how long ago I posted here on HN about how misleading voluntary response polls are. (One instance was in the last week.[1]) Another instance[1] was 1319 days ago, and I refer in that comment to a previous comment on the same issue.

Fun trivia fact: my join date is the same as patio11's join date.[3] He deservedly has much more accumulated comment and story karma here than I have, included probably hundreds of upvotes from me by now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8298063

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2177163

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11

Woah, you've really fleshed out the about portion of your profile since I checked it a few years ago!

It's kind of interesting to put HN in context of all the other services you use at least 1 time per week. I have a (relatively) old HN account -- 2287 days -- and now that I'm thinking about it, the only accounts/service that I use regularly and are older than this account are paypal, gmail, and steam. I'm probably forgetting others, but that's some real lasting power.

Mine is not as old as yours, but a few years old (1689 days), and yet it feels like one of my newest accounts, something I've only started using recently. Maybe I don't pick up accounts as easily as I used to. Older still-active ones include, at least: Slashdot, Wikipedia, Musicbrainz, OpenStreetMap, Yahoo, Gmail, an IRC nick, Paypal, eBay, Amazon, AIM, and a webhosting account. HN feels like the new addition that I'm still sorting out, despite it being years now.

A poll doesn't seem like the right way to get this information. If you ask an HN admin nicely, perhaps you could get a histogram of account age, either raw or with at least N karma.

Even that is not terribly accurate. I've been reading HN for a long time but just created an account last year. I'm not going to even vote since i can't give a proper estimate.

i'd wager nearly everyone lurked before making an account

I agree, although since changing one's username isn't possible, I think many people create new accounts. (I did.) That would skew the stats, but it'd still be better than a poll.

You would probably also want to filter for active within the past N days. Depending on how HN is set up, this might be difficult to implement.

> A poll doesn't seem like the right way to get this information.

You may be correct. I guess I'll let the community decide by upvoting.

> If you ask an HN admin nicely, perhaps you could get a histogram of account age, either raw or with at least N karma.

In that case it wouldn't be seen by the community, which is half the reason I posted the poll. Unless, of course, I took the time to digest the information and push a well-written blog post—which would be best in this case.

You can get more information from: https://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/months

I'm not sure if it's up to date because it uses the hn-search-api from octopart, and it was changed to algolia.

I think it shows (almost) all the users, but another interesting statistic is the current active users.

This is cool. Do you run this site?

Nope, totally unrelated. It was submitted ~2 year ago, probably by the author. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5160065 (179 points by freework 588 days ago | 98 comments)

As of this post, less than 5 minutes. But I've been reading attentively for just over 2 years.

Relatively new member (less than 2 years) here. I suspect the kinds of people who have been on HN for 1000+ days and are still active commentators skew towards being fairly experienced programmers/software developers. As a result, they are among the members of this forum with more informed observations on many of the technology discussions.

As someone closer to the junior side of my career, I tend to participate less because I'm frequently out of my depth. I read the articles that catch my interest as well as their comments, but I usually don't feel the need to contribute.

A large chunk of the older membership don't really post much anymore. We've seen countless iterations of arguments over vi, emacs, lisp, haskell, tex, bsd, keyboards, standing desks, the controversial geek hero/traitor of the year, epiphanies from recent college grads who have plumbed the deep mysteries of life, morality vs money debates, disconnecting from social media sites X, Y, and Z, hacktivism, hack-the-self, hack-your-job, hack-your-toothpaste...

After awhile you just go into a semi-permanent lurk mode, waiting for the odd gem to show up. I remember a similar experience with Slashdot in the late 90s.

I found out about HN around the time that "Joel On Software" community was dying out. I'm guessing a lot of people migrated from there?

I seem to remember stumbling upon Startup News, and then the next day it had changed it's name. Bit of a shock to find out that was 7 years ago.

let me get back to you in a bit -- at 999 days exactly.