I’ve GoatCounter [1], a "privacy-friendly" site visit counter that tracks pageviews by inserting a small JavaScript snippet on my website for some weeks now.

Today, I posted a link [2] to a blog post of mine on HN, but instead of linking directly, I used my YOURLS URL shortener. In the span of about 2 hours, I saw ~350 clicks counted on the shortened URL. When I checked the raw hits from my GoatCounter data, there were exactly 7 hits recorded—3 of which had hackernews.com as the referrer.

I was expecting that a good number of HN users might be using AdBlock or VPNs, but 98% of my traffic being blocked or filtered seems unusually high. Is this a common experience for anyone else here? Do most HN users have AdBlock, VPNs, or other privacy tools that block tracking scripts?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34265127 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097184