What I've Learned from Hacker News (2009) | Hacker News Reader

What I've Learned from Hacker News (2009)

paulgraham.com

101 pointsvinnyglennon36 comments

Open articleView on HN

Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495053

Another (short) discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19201999

Discussion about an update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4285333

Other submissions without discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8466459

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730494

Maybe the mods can add a new FAQ on what the uniques and traffic growth is like now. And maybe update it on even just a yearly basis?

Growth has been consistent for years, if you squint to smooth out big swings. It's linear, which is about how we like it.

Uniques are up to 4.5M or so per month, depending on how you count.

There's one intriguing exception to the linear growth: the number of submissions has been roughly flat since 2012. Comments, votes, accounts, page views, basically everything have all grown at about the same rate, but not submissions. I'm grateful for that, because we don't have any moderation capacity to spare. But it's interesting to speculate about why.

Isn't there some internet effect where most of a large community lurks and only a small percent produce? [1]

I find it low friction to comment. But as a reader I go here for my news, so there is no news for me to potentially share. Even if I do find something I am not in the habit of posting to HN.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

> But it's interesting to speculate about why.

Indeed, this is quite interesting. What is your hypothesis? A plateau regarding new content on the internet that is of interest to the user base, perhaps?

What is the percentage of duplicate posts, and what is the percentage of submissions that stay on the first page of HN for a sufficient amount of time to get traction? Is there any data on this?

That's my hypothesis, yes. But I wonder how to test it.

I'm afraid I don't have those numbers at hand; sorry.

Why would a site that isn't growing be considered dead?

To me a website that grows too much is dead. Reddit has reached that phase now. Started out great but has turned in to Facebook

> Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/

I agree, I check in there now and again but I find the quality of discussion to be very low.

Really depends on the subreddit. On the front page ones, sure. But you get into the enthusiast and smaller ones you can still get a lot of high quality discussion.

I find the best subs fit all or most of the following characteristics:

1. No politics

2. Nobody trying to sell you something or promote themselves

3. Based around a single, external topic, usually an established IP

Examples: r/Factorio, r/asoif,

Yep. The moderators also make or break it. When immature people (especially seems to be a lot of teenagers) get ahold of the mod powers and go on power trips (which happens surprisingly often), it's the end of that subreddit.

From the article: > Technology can enhance discussion. Nested comments do, for example. But I'd rather use a site with primitive features and smart, nice users than more advanced one whose users were idiots or trolls.

I'd agree and say I don't think reddit has the quality of discussion in posts or comments that it used to.

There are plenty of great subreddits though. Just because the big ones are crap doesn't mean they all are.

Over time the attrition rate for attention increases. As a result it becomes harder to justify further investments in usability features or content quality because you can no longer leverage the increased attention of more users in the future. This can lead towards a death spiral of lower frequency updates leading to less viewers leading to less updates.

For a venture-backed site even hitting a 20% growth rate per month would be a warning that you're not growing fast enough to justify continued investment, as was the case for a recent postmortem on Gumroad [1].

Given that this post was from 10 years ago that's definitely not the case for Hacker News, but in this climate it's gotten even more extreme if you're relying on venture backing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733

I'm not much of a money guy to be honest but isn't profit what dictates how much you can invest on the product?

If you have a constant user base that provides constant profit why is growth needed to sustain a business?

It's not needed to sustain the business but it is needed for those who invested in it and would like to cash out on a higher valuation - which typically is achieved through growth.

But often useful products are shut down because they are not growing fast enough instead of simply letting it run without investing much into it.

The key words here are "venture-backed".

Not an answer, but a business that isn't growing is considered a failing/dieing business.

Does this apply to businesses that aren't in serious debt, and don't have investors waiting for growth-dependent returns? I'd be surprised if my local baker considered stability to be failure, or a precursor to closing down.

HN generates emotional friction[1], is filled with shallow but clever sounding dismissals[2] and is filled with low quality discussions on high quality articles[3].

[1]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/787775131682758657

[2]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1068457691171958785

[3]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/731198734726356993

> low quality discussions

I'd put your citations of tweets clearly expressing personal opinion as devaluing the conversation.

I typically find highly rated comments on HN as useful in adding new information or perspective to an article or discussion.

I agree. I would argue that I get a lot more value out of the comments than than the linked content.

The only major issue I have with the comments on HN is that early ones get a lot more upvotes, causing later--but just as valid--points of view to be lost.

The early bird gets the worm and the early comment gets the karma.

Maybe a dynamic system that randomly shows an order weighted on upvotes in the past X minutes. That’d give fresh comments a chance to compete.

When a discussion is interesting enough for me to want to follow it, I will search the page for "minutes ago" to find the newest posts. It might be nice if new posts were highlighted for some amount of time.

I have a user script for that [1]. If you visited a story's comments before, it will highlight new comments and can auto-collapse threads without new comments. Otherwise, it gives you a slider you can use to highlight the X most recent comments.

[1] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/18066-hn-comment-trees

That's on our list.

Hacker News temporarily lifts new comments towards the top for a couple of minutes to give them a chance of being seen.

I have to agree. The rules can seem a little ridiculous and somewhat arbitrary seeming here sometimes, but i have to admit, HN probably has the highest level of discourse on most articles I read here, sometimes better than the articles themselves, than most other sites i tend to browse. I read with showdead on and i find sometimes it's somewhat insightful to read a dead comment and figure out why. Sometimes they're completely infactual, spammy or rude but other times it's hard to figure out why.

Above all though, I learn things here all the time. There's some really knowlegeable people here and the range of topics that gets covered is more diverse than you might think.

I can't remember exactly when, a few weeks ago at least, i remember seeing an article about brewing tea or something on here and there was an extremely in depth discussion on the subtlties of tea and effects of brewing. There was some chemistry thrown in there and some oddly specific knowledge. It was great. I don't think i've ever learned so much from a discussion on tea before.

Also, just some of the personal anectodes and life stories i've read here really blow me away sometimes.

I've browsed a lot of different sites, the community of people here seem to be unlike most other sites, even similar ones.

There's a fairly high level of snobbishness and disconnect from some oddly ordinary aspects of life...and honestly sometimes I worry this site is full of sociopaths....

But, it's a pretty cool community of people that reminds me of the days of the old internet in ways that a lot of other sites don't. I never really feel like I'm wasting time even reading comments here, because the amount of accumulated knowledge and experience just seems to be a lot higher than pretty much anywhere else I browse regularly.

If you can dig up the discussion on tea, I'll ask Craig to add it to the next highlights list (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...).

I think it may have been this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654982

It seems familiar. That was the most recent I could find. I'm honestly not too sure. That discussion's pretty good too if it's mot the same one. There were a few articles about tea that came up in my search.

I honestly can't tell if this is a shallow dismissal or if you are proving your own point by being the most upvoted comment.

I don't immediately see the relation to his random tweets almost a decade later?

>You are blocked from following @paulg and viewing @paulg's Tweets. Learn more

rofl

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