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Comment by RivieraKid | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, why are CityLab articles so often on Hacker News homepage? I've never heard of CityLab elsewhere.

And a related question, is the popularity of paywalled articles here organic? I would expect that the vast majority of HN visitors don't have a subscription to Bloomberg etc., so paywalled articles should have a big handicap.

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A trip to Europe or Japan is enough for to people like me to say, "there's something wrong with my urban environment but I can't quite put my finger on it." CityLab is an answer to that nagging feeling. There's also a neat software engineering cross-over as design patterns in software engineering is a response to Christopher Alexander's work on urban design patterns, "The Pattern of Streets"

> why are CityLab articles so often on Hacker News homepage?

I've always assumed it was because they had quality articles about cities. Software engineers often have an extracurricular interest in other types of engineering.

It also helps that a lot of the urban planning trends in vogue, like "tactical urbanism", resemble the "move fast/break things" fast experimentation ethos.

Cities produce a crapton of data, and in general HN is receptive to anything trying to make sense of and improve things based on data.

I believe CityLab was a startup that was created to "bring tech" to Architecture and (as similar startups) pivoted into Media. Architecture is probably one of the most difficult sectors to disrupt. It's obscure but there is a lot of research already (most architecture interns are doing it and often for free) and no low hanging fruit to pick. Most startups aim to transform this research in "tech money" but soon they acknowledge that their task is sisyphean.

Architect here.

Re paywalls, it's not so much that most users have subscriptions as that they're making use of various workarounds. That's not by coincidence because paywalls with workarounds are the ones that are allowed here. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Yes, the popularity of such articles is, as far as can tell from the data, organic.

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