I just looked it up, and apparently War and Peace is about 590,000 words. A book that is a joke in every 90's cartoon as something "really heavy to drop on someone's head", and apparently I've written almost that much arguing with people on a programmers forum.
I've been on here for about 10.5 years, so averaging about 48,515 per year. My favorite book is The Go Between by LP Hartley, and that's 98,621 words [1], so I'm basically writing the equivalent of about half of my favorite novel every year.
So it's a bit weird to me. A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.
I don't know, you have 10 years in this writing, I have 15 years. I've gained so much from 15 years of conversations with people about the topics that come up on HN. That's a lot different than writing an equivalent amount by yourself on a topic you hope others will find meaningful.
So many geographic maps turn out to be just population maps (1). I wonder how much different these rankings would be if you divided the number of words by the account's lifespan. We're all talking about the most "prolific" commenters here, but are we really just talking about the oldest accounts?
I'd love to see two overlaid graphs. One is the top 1000 as currently implemented. The other is the age of that account.