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News.YC Growth

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114 pointspg63 comments

"we'll simply run out of new people the site appeals to."

That means eliminating politics stories, because those:

* Appeal to pretty much anyone with an opinion, including lots of non-hacker types.

* Really suck people in. "Someone is wrong on the internet!"

Look at how many comments there were on the Obama/Broadband story. Were any of them really that interesting? I would expect the hacker mind (at least those who are not devout followers of the 'keep the government out of it' school) to have already arrived at the fact that it's some sort of monopoly/oligopoly situation and to cast about for research on what sorts of policy approaches might cause what effects, and have what sort of consequences, both positive and negative. One minute with Google scholar turns up this, for instance: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119176828/abstrac... Most likely, someone who actually knows something about economics might be able to point to others of interest.

But that takes a lot more effort than the simple sorts of debate that tend to surround those stories.

The degradation of quality posts/comments is inevitable as news.yc or any social news site grows. The only thing saving new.yc is the limited appeal of the subject matter.

This is like moving from a small town to a big city. Someone can be rude to another person in a big city because more than likely they will never meet a again. In a small town everyone knows everyone else and word spreads rapidly. You don't want to act like an ass in a small town because everyone will hear about it.

In large online communities, karma is supposed to act as an incentive to be nice and contribute thoughtfully, but it is not as effective as true reputation among people that you know personally. What the world as a whole thinks of you is less powerful than what your friends think of you.

A good experiment would be to enforce the small town effect on an online community. Partition a news site into groups of 100-1000 members. Comments and submissions would only be visible inside each members subgroup until upvoted past a certain threshold. With luck members would get to know one another inside a group and desire each others respect enough to contribute to the discussion meaningfully. Debates would last for days or weeks instead of an afternoon as is the case on current news sites. Trolls damage would be confined to one group at time as well.

That sounds like a really interesting idea, why don't you build it?

A few months ago I had an idea for automatically forcing people to submit story's to sub groups as the sight grows. So it starts as a base line then it's a Funny, then it's Funny, picture then it's Funny, picture, cat etc. And at each level people can automatically weigh how much they like each sub group. Then set the homepage as the average weight people give each sub group. Then redit started adding sub redits and I realized it was an easy idea to copy.

I might just try to build it. I don't have too much experience with web development, but I have some time off for Christmas and that would be a great way to learn. It sounds like you have spent some time thinking about news sites. Do you have any recommendations for language/framework/existing open source code?

Hey, I'm in the same situation as you. Look for my email in my profile if you want to work together -- or at least bounce around ideas.

I've got 3 weeks of nothing planned until school re-starts, and by then, who knows.

This is how Facebook achieves scale without sustaining damage from trolls.

This is sort of related to the traffic here: a snapshot of my Google Analytics after having a link on the front page for about three days.

http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/ga.jpg

(This is the post, for reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388510 )

Off-topic: Kudos on the novel blog design. It's especially interesting how each of your three posts uses a different layout. The third one -- the black and red one -- leads me to believe you're either insane or insanely creative. Anyway, nice job, keep them coming.

He's definitely both.

Your 404 page did make me chuckle..

http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/

"yeah no"

Other interesting data: http://top.searchyc.com/

It's worth noting that most of the top submissions are actually really good, whereas on Reddit none of the top submissions are even remotely good.

Comparing the main reddit to HN is hardly fair. There are, for instance:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/

http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/

You are right! Some submissions are the same. And all submissions have the quality there too.

There was a time when reddit was very good. But then the noise came and it was game over.

I know it's the alarmist thing to say, but it's starting here.

While there have been flurries of "poor" content accruing a decent set of points in the past, I'm now starting to see a lot of downvoting occurring. Previously, downvotes were used on spam, offensiveness, or flat out "wrong" comments - whereas now it appears to be an indicator of opinion. This shift demonstrates how significant the "new wave" of HN users is.

There's nothing wrong with using the arrows to express agreement or disagreement. I personally prefer the discussion to be a little polarized, because it seems like we put in a lot more effort into our words in that case.

Sure we do. Revising your opinions in a way to get extra karma does take a lot more effort.

If you think you're going to lose a bunch of karma for just expressing your opinion, you'll follow the group opinion and it leads to groupthink.

Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement.

If that's an official sanction, then I'm in Giles Bowkett's camp. That sort of policy leads to groupthink, not honest debate where people feel at ease to express their opinions, however controversial.

I've routinely voted up people I disagree with because I thought this was a place where opinions across the spectrum were to be encouraged. It would be sad to see this is now not the case and that instead you should say whatever's most likely to get you points. Are the people on the leaders board meant to be the most "average" in opinion as judged by HN readers? That sounds downright boring.

Of course, you might just be saying that's how people use downvoting, not how they should use it - which I'd agree with. Even so, a sanction against this practice would be super as it removes one's motivation to actually express one's true opinion (unless burning karma is one's hobby).

I actually agree with you that it used to be next to impossible to be down-voted here, (unless you were a complete tool) and now it's a lot more frequent, as your comment ironically demonstrates.

I'm a tad sad seeing Techcrunch.com and ValleyInsider.com on the top 10 submitted urls ;( but this is still my number favorite site as far as people go.

"... I'm a tad sad seeing Techcrunch.com and ValleyInsider.com on the top 10 submitted urls ..."

A function of TC being seen as a leading VC/Startup news source and user submissions to extra points?

Is TechCrunch a leading VC/Startup news source? I'm not trying to be a smartass. It always seemed like tabloid trash to me. The articles are poorly researched, poorly written and often consist of almost nothing of substance once you get beyond an attention-grabbing headline. I would imagine that's a consequence of the often misleading or, at worst, incorrect articles they have a tendency to publish. As far as I'm concerned they have zero credibility.

I consider techchrunch as tabloid trash. HN is meant for nice informative articles and threads. But sadly now, the quality has gone down.

"... Is TechCrunch a leading VC/Startup news source? ..."

I'm not saying TC is a good news source, simply noting that it's consistently lists high on posters & voters minds. TC is closer to 'The register' than I'd like.

The list of top submitted sites is not a list of the sites users are most interested in. In some cases the site owners submit every post, but many never get enough upvotes to make it onto the front page. To find the sites users are most interested in, you want not the raw number of posts per site, but the number that get over some threshold of points.

http://top.searchyc.com/domains_by_average_points

Is this a better list?

Yes, much better. The total submissions/total points are skewed by sites (TC) and blogs (CodingHorror) that post every day, sometimes multiple times per day. If you get enough at-bats, you'll get a lot of hits.

What's scary is that 'Hot or Not' is on the list. That is the digg-type stuff we need to keep out.

But to be honest, I haven't seen a whole lot of 'fluff' in the short period I've been here.

http://searchyc.com/submissions/hotornot.com

It is not 'digg-type stuff'. It's a founder, talking about a successful startup.

What is the threshold?

It'd be nice to look at the same list, but for the last N months. Subjectively it feels that the number of TC stories on the front page has gone down.

While the number of nytimes stories has gone up.

To me this is just as bad. Occasionally their is a good story, but nothing that can't be found at any number of other news sites or blogs.

I've submitted a few NYT stories - but they've all turned out to be submitted by someone else. All of them have been science stories that can't be found elsewhere. My reason for submitting them was, as PG said, they appealed to my hacker mind.

Yeah those are likely the stories I enjoy. Especially when nytimes breaks the story and has it first.

This is pretty cool. Would be even more interesting to see the full distribution on a plot.

"Growth can't keep going at this rate forever without ruining the site, though. Between those two alternatives, we prefer growth to slow down."

I actually agree with you on this, and I wasn't going to say anything, but I've been a little discouraged by some of the stuff I've seen up-voted lately. I think Hacker News is a special place and hope to protect the community that we've built here.

I personally don't see the content of the articles degrading as much as the comments. If anything there seems to be more movement and moderation of the articles which mostly is an improvement. The thing that I notice is the depth and quality of the comments. It took me a while to build up enough confidence to go from a lurker to a member and actually make comments. It was nice to feel that sense of pressure to make a quality comment that actually adds to the conversation rather than simply take up space or repeat what another person has said so that I can make my post.

The moment a social news site begins to degrade in my opinion is when comments are posted that add little or nothing to advancing or starting conversation (for example "Modded up for _______", "Really Nice _____" or my favorite "When I read the title of this post I thought it said ___. I have had too much ________ today")

There was a period where it felt as though the same articles would sit on the front page all day. The increase in the gravity for old posts and the increase in total number of posts has caused me (and I would assume others) to become more active in the site. I think the focus in moderation should be on the comments to set an example for what is expected.

Yeah, it's true, comments probably have suffered a bit. It might be possible to do something about this. Maybe I could use a statistical filter to auto-detect potentially vapid comments and ask the submitters if they're sure they want to post them.

I was originally referring to stories, although for the stories that I disagree with, I'll get a massive karma beat down. So I guess it's more of a personal thing for me.

Maybe an informal etiquette reminder displayed with a "confirmation" for potentially bad comments. The downvote never hurts either.

The stupid filter (http://stupidfilter.org/main/) is out there, time to start using it?

I get this strange feeling that I may represent a third of all daily hits.

Perhaps I spend too much time here. Something about the company of intelligent individuals...

I imagine we all have this issue from time to time.

Is it because the experience here is so good, or...

Is something in your work "missing" so much that your passion pulls you here instead.

hn is great, but if it "attracts" you more than your project, then it's time to take a good hard look at your project.

It's the community.

I will most likely never release a webapp (I'm an embedded kinda guy), but I like seeing what others are doing and reading about their insights and experiences. It's one of the few places I can find a group of smart people doing something I find interesting.

Would be cool to know what the big spikes on the graphs represent.

meretricious |merəˈtri sh əs|

adjective

1 apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity : meretricious souvenirs for the tourist trade.

2 archaic of, relating to, or characteristic of a prostitute.

In the Just Curious Dept:

Can you provide the number of user accounts?

Have the number of posts also increased 12x fold? The turnover on the new page seems more like 3-5x from what it used to be.

Also, any idea what those two huge spikes are at the beginning of August and, especially, the middle of September?

The one in the middle of September was the beginning of Eternal...

(Sorry, that was too hard to pass up.)

Spikes in page views are usually misbehaving crawlers.

See here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379932

Cool, thanks. (The number of users 9 days ago from pg: 12385)

Anyone know the number of daily posted links? Comments? Now versus six months and/or a year ago?

The word 'meretricious' has always irked me because if you didn't know what it meant you might mistake it for a positive one.

Way off-topic I know.

Just as a comment. I barely ever read the front page. I check the "new" page once every couple of hrs (and read/post al that).

The wealth of information is great.. the front page has.. well.. loses it's interest after a couple of hrs of the day..

I have a query for the userbase: how much do you think the quality of this site would go down is URLs from Techcrunch were banned?

I suggest that it wouldn't be very much :-).

TC reviews of startups are the most reliable, in the sense that a) there will always be one (TC is thorough) and b) the quality and viewpoint is fairly consistent so they're more valuable because you know the bias, as opposed to a review from some random site.

Somehow I don't accept consistent bias as an acceptable aspect of a review, or any journalism piece for that matter.

This is the internet. Surely something with a consistent bias is the lesser evil compared to an unknown bias.

18,000? I thought this was about 100,000

So PG's conjecture is there is a equilibrium point of appeal for people part of this site?

the graph doesnt show any signs that the growth will slow down, rather the contrary.

compete.com is way off:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.ycombinator.com/?metri...

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