This would be more interesting if you added one more column, dividing the number of HN followers by the total number of followers. @Shitmydadsays has 1.8 million followers, but the people ahead and behind that account on this list each have <30K followers. Clearly, those accounts (@al3x and @dhh) are more Hacker Newsy.
I don't consider myself a hacker, so am not best placed to pass judgement, but... it seems like the true hacker ethos is not to swim with the stream, and yet here is pretty clear proof that hnews has formed its own stream. How many hackers here check the list and de-follow anything not in the long tail, fearing getting caught-up in groupthink?
I apologise in advance if this causes offence; stream or not, I still have tremendous respect for this very high calibre community.
>it seems like the true hacker ethos is not to swim with the stream
I don't think so. The hacker ethos is about being clever and hacking stuff.
Hackers don't do things differently just to be different. They do things differently because they see the world differently. The reason there is a "hacker community" is because hackers meet each other and say "No shit! You do that too! I thought I was the only one!"
Like any good community, it's about commonalities.
But not all groups engage in groupthink. Organizational psychologists talk about ways to reduce and/or avoid groupthink in an organization or community.
If you believe that Hacker News is suffering from groupthink, you should present evidence of that, and then the community could take action to try and reduce it.
Personally I don't see it. I strongly doubt anyone is deleting people off their twitter based on this submission.
This list was generated organically, rather than handed down from on high. It is not a decree to unfollow anyone not on the list, but rather an opportunity to see a list of people on twitter that other intelligent people with similar interests follow.
Would LOVE to see this weighted by the each user's HN Karma score. For example, a user with 1000 Karma who follows Harj should be worth more than a user with 10 Karma who follows Lessig.
I remember when @PaulG joined Twitter he quickly gained several thousand followers in a few hours via a link from Hacker News. This data is based on only 400-500 users. I would say the majority of the Hacker News community is left out.
This reflects what the HN community represent, and we are certainly not all hackers. Entrepreneurs? Perhaps. Notice a lot of VCs got pretty high up on the list.
Ah, that's my fault actually, it occasionally chokes on punctuation (especially ampersands), I plan to fix that this weekend. It's not an official Y Combinator twitter feed by the way, it's just something I knocked up in my spare time.
