Hacker News Reader

Comment by allendoerfer | Hacker News Reader

Okay, let's fix this, here are some suggestions they could think about:

- Improve the design a bit. Carefully, you do not want to piss of old subscribers.

- Improve the conversion rate. There is a middle ground between newsletter modals and burying the method to subscribe.

- Introduce a few new products. As far as I can see, at the moment it is just "in depth news for OSS, especially kernel hackers". Maybe they could package some parts of this up for different audiences (security notices, content partnerships etc.).

- Some marketing tactics. "Invite a new subscriber to get this badge." SEO could be improved, too.

View on HN

IMHO, I think they should be really careful regarding your last point - marketing tactics.

Gamification, i.e. badges, I don't think would go over too well with their subscriber demographic. I think something like a free month, a free public share of a link (I don't know LWN very well, but I do remember reading articles there which say that some member sponsored the article to make it public) or a bundle of $RELEVANT_TO_YOUR_INTERESTS white papers may work better.

Otherwise I think you make some very solid points, especially trying to find out how to subscribe was much harder than it should be...

>"Invite a new subscriber to get this badge."

Which would then have to be displayed, which would be more visual spam for no good reason, which would piss off the core users.

> - Improve the design a bit. Carefully, you do not want to piss of old subscribers.

I simply tried to change the font-family to Segoe UI (or whatever your OS' font) in Developer Tools, and it looks more interesting than Times New Roman

I think they should improve the general information architecture. Make content more discoverable. Categories, tags, overview pages, or just a better layout of the home page, which is not only date-based.

Essentially increasing the visitor time for new visitors, then increasing the recurring visitors, then increasing the sign ups.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com