HACKER Q&A
📣 7777777phil

Are 98% of HN Readers Using AdBlock?


I’ve GoatCounter [1], a "privacy-friendly" site visit counter that tracks pageviews by inserting a small JavaScript snippet on my website for some weeks now.

Today, I posted a link [2] to a blog post of mine on HN, but instead of linking directly, I used my YOURLS URL shortener. In the span of about 2 hours, I saw ~350 clicks counted on the shortened URL. When I checked the raw hits from my GoatCounter data, there were exactly 7 hits recorded—3 of which had hackernews.com as the referrer.

I was expecting that a good number of HN users might be using AdBlock or VPNs, but 98% of my traffic being blocked or filtered seems unusually high. Is this a common experience for anyone else here? Do most HN users have AdBlock, VPNs, or other privacy tools that block tracking scripts?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34265127 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097184

  👤 jsheard Accepted Answer ✓
Some of those phantom visitors might have been bots, most of which wouldn't show up on analytics simply because they don't run Javascript at all.
👤 Bender
Most people on HN use ad blockers. This site also has a referrer-policy of origin [1] which some browsers and addons will ignore but most will not leave trails in your logs.

If unsure look up the IP addresses and see if they are in data-centers or home/mobile networks. [2a][2b] Most real people will be using HTTP/2.0 assuming you log this in your web server access logs and most bots will be HTTP/1.1 with some very rare exceptions. The stinky bad bots will also show up on mobile networks but the vast majority of them will be using HTTP/1.1.

[1] - https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinato...

[2a] - https://bgp.he.net/

[2b] - https://bgp.tools/