Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikpanko | Hacker News Reader

Lots of comments about how to improve the project and the “secret sauce” of Hacker News.

The real secret to Hacker News is the ability to attract a large target audience on an ongoing basis to view and contribute. It is the most difficult part of most software projects and especially social ones. Every HN-like project needs to have a plan around this. Andrew Chen explains it well in his book “The Cold Start Problem”.

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Here’s the PDF version of that book - nice of the author to publish it for free http://andrewchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ColdStartPr...

> The real secret to Hacker News is the ability to attract a large target audience on an ongoing basis to view and contribute.

This might be a good time to mention voat. It was a better reddit than reddit, it had a superior UX, it performed better as well, but ultimately the community was utter shit.

Social networking services are not a technical challenge.

quantifying technical achievements is a lot easier than qualifying policy changes.

X amount of views, X amount of subs, etc.

Removing problem people.

I feel like voat is a lesson that something cannot be a success when its main sales pitch is "It's not [other thing A]"

Well, what was at least in my echo chamber considered to be the inofficial sales pitch of Facebook was "It's not MySpace".

Similarly for Reddit: "It's not Digg".

So in my opinion B's sole marketing pitch "It's not [other thing A]" can work if B is considered to be the new cool kid in town.

Reddit was a great community with its own character and norms prior to the great Digg exodus. It mostly managed to hold onto them, at least while it still made some kind of sense to think about reddit as one community vs. 10,000 subreddits.

They each had an AND attached to it that made them better.

Facebook was just like MySpace AND everyone at your university is on it (which then became timeline/news feed, and chat was added, etc.)

Reddit was just like digg (front page of the internet) AND had thousands of niche communities you could connect to

Voat was just like Reddit but had no AND that caused users to stick around. Discord is more of a threat because it is a community hub AND it provides live chat, voice channels, video sharing, etc.

Software clones are easy. Providing that AND is what makes companies stand apart and thrive

I don't think it's a valid take. If the incumbent is doing a shit job and pushing it's entire userbase always, providing the same service without being shit is definitely a good sales pitch.

It definitely didn't perform better. Each page request would do a giant N+1 query for all the comments and it frequently went down due to load.

Also strict rules/culture and paid fulltime moderators/curators.

This. Dang (Daniel) is a cyborg, meant in the best possible way. He moderates this place better than anywhere else on the internet that I know of.

That’s a low bar though.

I have scraped the comments here at random. There’s plenty of “violations” that are missed.

This comment feels like confirmation bias relative to my measure.

That people believe it’s a certain type of forum likely plays as much or more of a role than moderation. It intentionally does not function like Reddit or Twitter and that makes obvious what content is favored.

best in class is not a low bar

I don't agree at all that whole-site moderation is a "low bar".

The two together are key. There are many subreddits which had a great culture but mods went underwater when the sub hit ~100k, the point where every sub becomes closer to the norm. And obviously you can't just pay a mod to create something special, it takes two.

Yes, network effects is a fascinating concept and only very few products can figure it out. Please HN, never change :)

>Please HN, never change :)

Well, it has grown quite a lot since the early days so that inevitably makes it a target for some groups.

you're just in the pot as the water warms. Take a critical look at HN now vs. 10 years ago; it has change immensly. The key question is has the core integrity of the original project been violated? That's less clear.

There are other key questions that could be asked to. Like, has it improved over 10 years?

I’d say yes. The breadth, range and typical tone of articles has changed. You still come across content that has stuffy tone.

I agree that HN's deliberate design to foster an endless September is unusual.

I suspect full time professional development and moderation also plays a role.

Also, starting as a passion project of a competent programmer with decades of experience.

I hope Two Stop Bits thrives, but I suspect full time professional staff is a long shot.

Hope I am wrong.

It does make me wish that HN somehow “spoke to” mastodon/other activity pub servers or something. I wouldnt mind the posts that float up to the front page here coming up in other places.

Thankfully the people that post here do tend to be people using federated social media as well haha

Plenty of HN bots on Mastodon already, e.g. I follow this one: https://social.lansky.name/@hn500

> The real secret to Hacker News is the ability to attract a large target audience on an ongoing basis to view and contribute

Attracting audiences is easy. I can create a website right now and get hundreds of people on it today. Keeping them around is what really matters.

HN has excellent moderation. That's the secret sauce. Otherwise people would have bounced already.

Nearly all the threads are 0 comments. I don’t think moderation is the problem. It really is hard to build an audience.

> Andrew Chen explains it well in his book “The Cold Start Problem”.

"Chapter 1: 'Venture Capital', or Kindling"

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