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righthandtoday at 3:15 PM2 repliesview on HN

> Then in November 2025, four thousand "visitors" showed up over a few days. Each visited exactly one page with a bounce rate of 99%. More telling was that they had no referrer. That's usually the easiest way I spot a bot.

> And they were only crawling my fund pages (like this one, this one, and this one), which only 10% of real visitors ever touch.

> But those 4,000 bots were just the warm-up.

I just hate this style of writing like you're on Twitter. Why does the above need to be 3 different paragraphs? A paragraph break indicates a separate thought but the author is still talking about the same data and still making their point. The sentence "But those 4,000 bots were just the warm-up." is effective when still the last line of a paragraph and it signals respect for your readers. I stopped reading after this because it's just a terrible reading experience.

Here's a correct version that doesn't read like the author left for a week to think about what the next sentence would be or having some sort of anxiety-induced mental pause:

> Then in November 2025, four thousand "visitors" showed up over a few days. Each visited exactly one page with a bounce rate of 99%. More telling was that they had no referrer, which is usually the easiest way I spot a bot. They were only crawling my fund pages (like this one, this one, and this one), which only 10% of real visitors ever touch. But those 4,000 bots were just the warm-up.


Replies

nickgraytoday at 3:31 PM

Hey! I'm the OP - thanks for feedback on my writing style. I went ahead and fixed this in the article. It should be updated by the time you read this:

https://patronview.com/news/99-percent-of-my-website-traffic...

And you're totally right: I mostly post on X (nee Twitter) and I probably have ADHD or just a low attention span, so I prefer to read things broken up into paragraphs. But for a smarter audience like this, and that reads long-form blog posts, I should tighten it up.

Thank you for the suggestion. LMK any other edits and I'll be happy to tighten it up.

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