The median visitor of HN should consider themselves not representative of the median worldwide internet user, we're a demographic that is very different than the majority in most aspects.
This includes your friends and contacts - if you look at the people around you and observe that everyone does/has X, it's still quite likely that most people worldwide look to people around them and observe that everybody has/does not-X. For us, personal experience is not really representative of reality (coincidentally, this is a common problem for startups and their market understanding), we often have to intentionally go much beyond our normal circle of contacts to see how the majority of "normal" users actually behave. Blogs are a particular example - actually, for most of general public, there's such thing as independent blogs; and most content providers are available without leaving e.g. the facebook ecosystem, insomuch that a regular reader can be unaware that it's "not facebook".
It's kind of similar to sociology/psychology, where studies often inadvertently are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) but the global average/median is very different from that.
This includes your friends and contacts - if you look at the people around you and observe that everyone does/has X, it's still quite likely that most people worldwide look to people around them and observe that everybody has/does not-X. For us, personal experience is not really representative of reality (coincidentally, this is a common problem for startups and their market understanding), we often have to intentionally go much beyond our normal circle of contacts to see how the majority of "normal" users actually behave. Blogs are a particular example - actually, for most of general public, there's such thing as independent blogs; and most content providers are available without leaving e.g. the facebook ecosystem, insomuch that a regular reader can be unaware that it's "not facebook".
It's kind of similar to sociology/psychology, where studies often inadvertently are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) but the global average/median is very different from that.