Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvorb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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