Hacker News Reader

Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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

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).

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.

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