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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Wow. It declined all the way to zero? I'd have expected it to tail off.

That's scary. What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Customer support?

I know everyone here is heckling calling it a forum, but this is a basic forum feedback loop -- the forum activity declines, so people show up to check less often and get fewer responses to their posts, so the post there less often, repeat until traffic falls near zero.

You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage, especially if the cost to continuing to run the forum is trivial, but it's basically a death spiral every time.

> You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage

Slashdot is firmly in this stage of its existence, and honestly it's kinda fun

I wonder what stage of the loop HN finds itself in.

So the question for all forums is "what is the user funnel?"

For some there's an obvious thing that brings people in, like if you're a forum tied to a webcomic or game, and the forum will live as long as that property does.

For others -- which I think HN falls into -- it's just word of mouth about a cool place to hang out, so it will die when there's a cooler place to hang out.

> What else can AI make decline all the way to zero?

Human facing web search. Most SaS.

Not sure about SaaS, For nearly all our SaaS AI's just made it easier to work with, we haven't got rid of a single SaaS product, but via APIs, we've integrated and automated a LOT more of our existing SaaS products.

I think it's like with everything. One one hand you can replace some SaaS with in-house developed services, but on the other hand, it makes integrations with SaaS that provide functionalities you can't or don't want to deal with way easier.

So you are probably right. It won't go to zero. Just shift towards more infrastructural and access services.

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