I was the one that linked the Harry Potter fanfic on HackerNews, I definitely wasn't expecting over 120 upvotes for it. I have linked other things there before and never gotten more than a handful of votes for them.
Added: for example, I also posted a link to A Different Spin on Ambiguity , which I thought was a lot more interesting than Harry Potter, but got not a single upvote.
I'm not sure about "a lot", but I do think the ambiguity article deserved more interest. ;)
I suspect the title may have had something to do with it, and have accordingly retitled it "This is your brain on ambiguity", which is somewhat more catchy.
This is a breakdown of Less Wrong's recent new user traffic, data sourced from the Less Wrong Google Analytics account.
67% StumbleUpon
16% Google
5.4% Reddit
3.6% Hacker News
3% Harry Potter story
0.7% Facebook
0.3% Overcoming Bias
4% "The Long Tail"
The 16% for Google is artificially high because many of those hits are users that are using Google as an address bar by searching for Less Wrong.
So we get an order of magnitude more traffic from Stumble Upon than anywhere else -- sometimes thousands of new users a day. Stumble Upon has been Less Wrong's biggest referrer of new users from the beginning of the site. That was surprising to me and I suspect it is also surprising to you. Some of our very best users, like Alicorn, came from Stumble Upon.
What can you do?
In order to get maximum Stumble power, you can't just stumble LW articles and only LW articles. You need to use Stumble Upon for a minute or two every now and then and vote up or down the random links it gives you. I know, it's annoying, but what are a few dust specks when we are talking about saving the world?
Thanks to Louie for help with this post.