> I wish I knew how many people viewed this question during that hour.
here's my naive attempt to crudely estimate this:
http://www.siteworthtraffic.com/report/ycombinator.com
> [daily] Unique Visitors 257,211
> [daily] Unique Pageviews 439,687
https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com > Total Visits 15.88M [per month]
> Pages per Visit 2.51
https://ahrefs.com/blog/website-traffic/ > SimilarWeb overestimated total unique visitors for 91.67% of the websites.
> SimilarWeb overestimated total unique visitors by 308.81% on average;
> SimilarWeb overestimated total pageviews by 210.58% on average.
SimilarWeb estimates 1.3 million total daily pageviews . Lets blindly correct trusting the ahrefs comment about overestimation, that gives us 1.3 / (1 + 2.106) = 0.42 million total daily pageviews. That roughly agrees with the siteworthtraffic 0.4 million unique daily pageviews number. So, let's arbitrarily trust siteworthtraffics 1/4 million unique daily visitors estimate.
Let's assume that traffic is uniformly distributed over each 24 hour period (wrong) and that 50% of traffic hits the first page of links under /news, /ask and /show (wrong) and that 50% of traffic hits other links. Of the former 50% of traffic, lets assume that 50% of people who click the link also scan the comments (wrong), and that views are proportional to the number of votes each link has (wrong), and that the current selection of links and votes is the same as during the 1 hour period between the question being asked and answered (wrong).
the sum of votes over links on the first three pages of /news, /ask and /show is roughly 4200 votes, and this ask topic has 19 votes, giving it a weight of 0.0044 .
multiplication gives 250,000 unique visitors / day * 1/24 * 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.0044 = 11 unique visitors during the 1 hour period before the question was answered.
it wouldn't be surprising if this estimate is off by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude -- underestimating, not overestimating, obviously -- if you can propose a more plausible estimate, propose away!
