Ask HN: Does this concern anyone else? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does this concern anyone else?

alexa.com

24 pointsmlLK44 comments

As they say in Samoa, fai fai le mu (: Relax. Sites evolve and change. Small towns get bigger. Eventually you become an old man who yells at neighborhood kids for walking on the lawn. Before you get to that stage, enjoy the fact that these systems evolve, and for every one that gets too big for your own personal tastes, there are a multitude of smaller ones. And then there are even your network of actual friends. Take it easy (:

Maybe. But it's still sad to see this site change into a big site with a wider audience. I definitely care less and less for the "discussion" that takes place here, which is frustrating to watch. Perhaps I'm just feeling pessimistic, but it seems like recently the tide of new visitors is too large to be assimilated without permanently changing HN's culture. Damn, maybe I am getting old...

EDIT: I also seem to recall that constant vigilance about the site's quality has always been a topic of discussion here. It's definitely healthy to raise a concern or two every now and again

How to say this without getting moderated into the ground...

Look, this site is what you make it. If you do not like the conversations, then start your own by submitting the kind of content that you'd like to see or at least participate.

You've been here almost 2 years, in that time you have not made a single submission and one of your 20 comments in that time is about how you don't like the direction the site is going in.

If you don't like it then take action, change the discussion to contain those elements that you care about and use your mod points to promote the content that you think contributes to the discussion most.

There is an awful lot of 'oh, I really don't like the direction HN is going in' here, as well as 'it used to be so nice'. I don't get that, it's pretty good right now, there is a TON of interesting stuff posted and discussed here.

I haven't been here nearly as long as you have, and I concur there are some 'growing pains' but on the whole it is pretty good. Help make it better!

I agree that users should participate if they want to make the site better. And yes, there still are interesting posts. Still, I see people getting modded up for saying "go with the flow," and modded down for questioning the site's direction. First of all, these are OPINIONS, usually not worthy of up or down mods.

I guess what I should have said was discussion about this site's direction used to be an important part of HN, and I wanted to continue that tradition.

Introspection is very healthy and worthy, I agree. My response was meant to counteract a little of the alarmism. As for opinions getting mods, that's generally how it works- in a way every post is a poll and you get people agreeing with that opinion or not- everyone understanding that it's really just an opinion. It's certainly rarely meant to be personal.

In short, if someone is modded down for questioning the site's direction, people are indicating that they respectfully disagree for the most part. (Man, I must have reached some kind of zen state today.)

Look, this site is what you make it.

Yes, that's why a lot more people will make it into something that's DIFFERENT from what it was when there were a lot fewer people.

You've been here almost 2 years, in that time you have not made a single submission

Red herring.

If you don't like it then take action

He can not do diddlysquat. Only pg and the mods could take action by viciously removing any article which even remotely strays from a pre-determined core character.

There is an awful lot of 'oh, I really don't like the direction HN is going in' here, as well as 'it used to be so nice'. I don't get that, it's pretty good right now

That's because we've seen this movie before. You may not have had a front row seat for the downfall of your favorite social news site, but many of us have seen it happen many times.

I haven't been here nearly as long as you have, and I concur there are some 'growing pains' but on the whole it is pretty good.

And as much as I like this place, I predict it is doomed, and before long even you will abandon it.

I don't understand your 'red herring' reference, if you do not increase the signal-to-noise ratio when you are perfectly capable of doing so then you can't really complain.

Also, everybody can 'flag' articles that are not suitable.

What was your favourite social news site before ?

It simply means that it doesn't matter how many articles you submit. If more people prefer other articles, with say more linkbait headlines, then yours will be buried. In short, simply submitting and voting is not a solution when more, many more people are voting other things up. More generic, shallower things.

And I flag a lot of articles, but very few of those get banned, same principle as with submitting. If a few people flag and a lot vote up, it stays. And "few" and "a lot" are relative terms here. They'll change with time.

I've seen narrow and deep focused discussions be replaced with wide and shallow discussions on many sites, but in rough order: Slashdot/Digg/Reddit/programming-reddit/science-reddit and I know I'm forgetting a few that came and went fast.

I'm going to follow you because that's my path too (though Digg was short lived).

The process is known as "the September that never ends".

Slashdot is a bit better now days though the rate of submission is slow.

Yep, Digg was a blip for me as well. It turned to crap lightning fast.

When PGs essays first led people away from Slashdot to Reddit, there was a noticable drop in the quality of Slashdot. And early on Reddit was a like beautiful jewel of social news sites.

Damn, maybe I am getting oldDamn, maybe I am getting old

You're not getting old. This has happened to many sites. And it will happen here as well. If you go way back in time you see me politely disagree with pg that soft policing is doomed to failure and the redditization of hn. Oh well. C'est la vie.

Look on the bright side - newmogul (HN clone for finance) still gets many interesting posts but community discussion there has almost completely dried up.

Well, first off, alexa.com is to be taken with about a pound of salt because of their way of sampling, even so, obviously something happened (maybe half the HN visitors decided to install the alexa toolbar).

Also, other such institutions can show wildly varying data, for instance have a look at 'compete' for ycombinator.com:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ycombinator.com/

It tells quite a different story.

The final arbiter here would be the log files of HN or some third party logging service (but HN doesn't use any of those afaik).

The traffic rank that alexa ascribes to news.YC is not in line with what I would expect at all (~5500), at that level HN should be seeing 150K uniques daily and I doubt that from the activity on the forum.

Traffic to HN was around 30,000 uniques per day at the end of April (source: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html)

I have a site with 20.000 uniques per day and the 3 month average rank in alexa is 7,771 so it seems pretty accurate.

Before alexa changed the ranking system it used to be on the top 1000.

Which part? Concern?

Interestingly, the growth over the last 6 months has been fairly consistent.

Check out the 'max' option, and from the start of the big jump in January, its been quite consistent.

I think things on the site have remained pretty good through the growth, but then again, maybe it is the constant evolving change. I'm curious how different the entries are from last year.

I think there is less a risk of the quality of HN degrading due to the fact that most people don't submit.

It would be interesting to see the stats on what % of users submit, what % leave comments, what % vote, and compare that with overall visits.

I suspect most of the growth has come from readers only. What do you say PG? have you got those stats?

I am not sure but I think what has gone unspoken here is the recent decline in quality of content on this site. Perhaps this is why he's concerned?

I think the quality of Hacker News is sort of like Escher's "Ascending and Descending" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascending_and_Descending).

People perpetually talk about how the quality is going down, when in reality it's not changing much at all.

I attribute it to the "honeymoon effect". New users are excited when they first find HN, but eventually the amazement wears off, even though the site hasn't changed.

HN is good, but not perfect. It's disillusioning for a new user to go through a bad day or a bad few days on HN, and people react to disillusionment. That might be another factor.

I like the comparison though I also like the wave pattern. For example, weekends are definitely worse than weekdays.

Possibly - but don't deny that this stuff doesn't happen. You may have been around for Reddit, and that's most definitely changed for the worse since when I started there (I've since quit). Turning into Digg and all that.

Reddit is still a fantastic place for discussion. Also it arguably has a better interface i.e. orange mailbox, saved links, etc. Perhaps not for startup stuff, but for politics & pop culture I think Reddit continues to do as good a job as anyone. Also, its tough to criticize Reddit with a blanket statement considering there are many independently moderated subreddits (arguably including this very site).

Maybe he is concerned about the relative popularity of HN in Kyrgyzstan?

Hmm, it'd be interesting if news.yc had a gauge on the top-right where we could indicate our feeling for the relative level of quality on the site on a given day. I donno if it'd be worth anything in QC terms, but it'd be one really interesting dataset to look at when compiled.

You already have that gauge, all you need to do is not upvote links... I think that works pretty good, if you post a bunch of links and they get 0 traction then that's an excellent indicator you're on the wrong path.

The number of 'dead' links and the average points of the 'new' submissions together are a pretty good indicator of what the audience thinks of the current crop of submissions.

The biggest thing that I've noticed is that it's becoming more and more rare that I'll recognize all the names in the comments.

It used to be that you would go into the comments section and it was the same herd of people talking, which was really useful because you didn't have to judge every comment on its own. You had an idea of where most of the commenters were coming from because you'd read a lot of their other comments. You knew if they tended to get their point across with sarcasm, or that they were really working on a startup that was very similar.

There are people here that I disagree with a lot of the time, but I have a ton of respect for their opinions because I know that they've always really thought about what they were saying and haven't just come in to stir up the pot.

With all the new faces, people get concerned because they don't know all these people so you have to judge every comment on its own.

In a way, it's like a favorite old bar suddenly becoming a hot night spot. The same people are still there, but there are all these other people. It's the same bar, but it's a different experience. Either all the new people will mesh well with the old people and it will be good for everyone, or they won't and the old people will find a new favorite place to hang out.

The only certain thing is that it will never be the way it used to be again.

I hate to to have to say this, but could we please have more descriptive titles? You can tell from some of the comments that a lot of people, myself included, are trying to figure out what would is so concerning on that page.

Also, the post title seems to be deliberately trying to manipulate readers into clicking through. HN isn't a newspaper that has to grab eyeballs with exciting headlines. Anyone worried about the "decline" of HN should be worried about posts like this.

It's highly likely that many startup founders have installed these types of toolbars to boost their own startup's numbers. Because of sampling issues, one additional person coming to this site gets extrapolated out many times over.

Rampant themes in most groups: 1. It was better before. 2. Quality has declined. 3. New people do not respect the rules.

Stop being so paranoid. Or if you can't stop, start a new outpost for hacker-like discussion somewhere else on the web. Only invite good people. When the rest of us realize that this place has gone to hell, we can come join you. :-)

"Oh, my God, they found me, I don't know how, but they found me. Run for it Marty!" - Dr. Emmett Brown

It's interesting to note the significant drop-off on weekends in Alexa's data.

I think every website on the planet experiences that.

Almost every website. Justin.tv actually has its peaks on the weekend - its traffic looks inverted compared to most websites.

It depends. If your focus is 'media/entertainment' you actually go up in the weekend.

I can confirm that, I own a computer games-focused site and our peak is on the weekend, too, with Sunday being the busiest day.

I've definitely noticed that effect here on HN, and it doesn't seem so pronounced on many other sites. Here are the first sites I could think of, and they seem pretty flat. Sites like HN and TechCrunch have less content on weekends, so you'd expect a drop-off in traffic.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/msn.com

didn't pg post a HN link, that just shows posts from only old users?

news.ycombinator.com/classic only counts votes from users more than a year old

At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I would really like a 2 year old version of /classic as well.

news.ycombinator.com/getoffmylawn would work if pg needs a URL suggestion.

Actually, getofmylawn would omit anything except for "everything was better in the past". Now, statistical analysis of that might yield some interesting results, but otherwise it would be pretty boring.

which bit exactly?

The 37% increase in volume + some stuff that's showing up on the front-page, I fear HN is under siege

Why is this at -2, exactly? All mILK did was respond to a question. If people don't like the response, they should at least post a reply.

I didn't downmod it, but I don't feel compelled to "correct" it back to 1. I grow tired of "the sky is falling" comments, and I guess some others do, too.

That was my original comment, but then I made the assumption they were referring to the explosive growth in 2009.

Does http://twitter.com/newsycombinator have anything to do with it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com