(Can I post a completely irrelevant comment about something that just baffled me? I submitted this question 40 minutes ago. Now I went to StackOverflow and it just awarded me the gold badge of 'Publicist', meaning that this link has been visited by 1000 unique IP addresses! I had this question open in another tab and it's true: it had 4950 views (with the best answer having 90 up-votes) when I submitted it, and now it has more than 6450 (best answer: 115 votes)! I honestly didn't know there were so many HNers... I always thought HN was a relatively small community.)
Sorry if it's not relevant, but I thought it might be interesting to others.
Yeah I thought the number of commenters was a reasonable approximation of the number of users on the site. I also was shocked when I found out how many people are on here! Turns out I'm an outlier in terms of commenting (I'm actually #76 https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders ).
I think the number of commenters fell quite dramatically after they stopped showing the score on comments. Before that HN felt like a much larger community.
When was that exactly? I've been around for about a year and half, and vaguely remember it. I think it was about a year ago. Is it right or my poor memory is playing tricks on me?
Sorry if it's not relevant, but I thought it might be interesting to others.