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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

How many users do you think HN has? No matter how many, I think I would call HN mostly a success (currently/temporary?). Seems that to have a good social network, it's less about quantity of content and more about quality. Most of Twitter is shit, but it contains some average content too, and a small amount of gold nuggets. HN feels to have much better signal/noise ratio and judging by myself and others who hang around here, it's way better here than what other "critical mass" social networks have.

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I don’t think it makes sense to compare HN to other social networks. It wasn’t started as a business that would need to turn a profit, it was started as a side project by a rich guy (Paul Graham) who wanted to see what smart people thought about things.

If HN fails to ever hit 1M users, PG (or Sam Altman) isn’t going to shut it down or cut off its funding, and neither he nor Y Combinator are expecting or relying on it to generate revenue. It continues to exist after over a decade because the Y Combinator folks find the content and discussion interesting.

And hey, that’s all well and good. I’m glad that HN sticks around when a more profit-driven site would’ve failed years ago. But it’s important to note that what works for HN likely wouldn’t work for anyone else.

> The platform says it will never sell user data and relies on "the generosity of individual donors" rather than ads.

Sounds like this isn't envisioned as a profit-making business, either. I'd happily donate some money to have a place my friends and family can easily hang out online that isn't trying to sell us to anything.

Profit is not quite the point. The point is that in order for HN to be a useful site, so that person n+1 decides to join, all they need is that the first n people have something interesting to say. For a Facebook competitor to be useful to person n+1, the first n people have to include a lot of their existing friends and family. Network effects.

HN is a marketing channel for startups who might want to pitch ycombinator, then market the startups they pick, then find employees for those startups, then repeat.

The value isn't in selling ads.

I see this whole line of reasoning that thousands of people isn't enough to be newsworthy a symptom of valleythink where all that is valued is growth.

There are other factors that indicate success and the community for the most part has lost sight of those for the tunnel vision of "must get funding!"

I agree that HN is not like most social networks, but it also bears resemblance with many other social networks. Largely the ones that are not founded for the reason of profits.

> But it’s important to note that what works for HN likely wouldn’t work for anyone else.

It's also important to note that what does work for HN, might work for others too. We won't know unless we try. Strict moderation is something that helped HN, helped make Flashback (Swedish Forum) tolerable and something many of the greatest subreddits applied with great success. Just an example.

Is HS a social network? I think of it more like a forum. On HN I don't really care exactly who I interact with. It's just as good to me without my family and friends being users (better, in fact :). Real social networks aren't like that.

"Real social networks"? There is nothing in "social network" that requires the relationship to be equal in real-life or that you even know the identity of the person you're writing with. Most would consider Twitter social media, and most people I know constantly interact and discuss with people they don't really care who they are and that's not what's important anyways.

I would say in general, places where you interact with other people ends up building some sort of social network of it's insides.

Yes I think it is a social network. They come in many shapes and forms. I think a forum is a social network too.

HN doesn't even have direct messages, though.

I don’t even use the direct message feature at all in Reddit, but I still feel like interacting with people when I write comments though.

I think the key difference is HN doesn't need to make money

Sure, we all choose our incentives. Facebook chose to follow money.

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