
What I've Learned from Hacker News (2009) - vinnyglennon
http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
======
ColinWright
Original discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495053)

Another (short) discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19201999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19201999)

Discussion about an update:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4285333](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4285333)

Other submissions without discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8466459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8466459)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730494](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730494)

------
marai2
Maybe the mods can add a new FAQ on what the uniques and traffic growth is
like now. And maybe update it on even just a yearly basis?

~~~
dang
Growth has been consistent for years, if you squint to smooth out big swings.
It's linear, which is about how we like it.

Uniques are up to 4.5M or so per month, depending on how you count.

There's one intriguing exception to the linear growth: the number of
submissions has been roughly flat since 2012. Comments, votes, accounts, page
views, basically everything have all grown at about the same rate, but not
submissions. I'm grateful for that, because we don't have any moderation
capacity to spare. But it's interesting to speculate about why.

~~~
wuschel
> But it's interesting to speculate about why.

Indeed, this is quite interesting. What is your hypothesis? A plateau
regarding new content on the internet that is of interest to the user base,
perhaps?

What is the percentage of duplicate posts, and what is the percentage of
submissions that stay on the first page of HN for a sufficient amount of time
to get traction? Is there any data on this?

~~~
dang
That's my hypothesis, yes. But I wonder how to test it.

I'm afraid I don't have those numbers at hand; sorry.

------
pvorb
Why would a site that isn't growing be considered dead?

~~~
boxy310
Over time the attrition rate for attention increases. As a result it becomes
harder to justify further investments in usability features or content quality
because you can no longer leverage the increased attention of more users in
the future. This can lead towards a death spiral of lower frequency updates
leading to less viewers leading to less updates.

For a venture-backed site even hitting a 20% growth rate per month would be a
warning that you're not growing fast enough to justify continued investment,
as was the case for a recent postmortem on Gumroad [1].

Given that this post was from 10 years ago that's definitely not the case for
Hacker News, but in this climate it's gotten even more extreme if you're
relying on venture backing.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733)

~~~
pier25
I'm not much of a money guy to be honest but isn't profit what dictates how
much you can invest on the product?

If you have a constant user base that provides constant profit why is growth
needed to sustain a business?

~~~
nf05papsjfVbc
It's not needed to sustain the business but it is needed for those who
invested in it and would like to cash out on a higher valuation - which
typically is achieved through growth.

------
waivek
HN generates emotional friction[1], is filled with shallow but clever sounding
dismissals[2] and is filled with low quality discussions on high quality
articles[3].

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/787775131682758657](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/787775131682758657)

[2]:
[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1068457691171958785](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1068457691171958785)

[3]:
[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/731198734726356993](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/731198734726356993)

~~~
everdev
> low quality discussions

I'd put your citations of tweets clearly expressing personal opinion as
devaluing the conversation.

I typically find highly rated comments on HN as useful in adding new
information or perspective to an article or discussion.

~~~
gav
I agree. I would argue that I get a lot more value out of the comments than
than the linked content.

The only major issue I have with the comments on HN is that early ones get a
lot more upvotes, causing later--but just as valid--points of view to be lost.

~~~
koolba
The early bird gets the worm and the early comment gets the karma.

Maybe a dynamic system that randomly shows an order weighted on upvotes in the
past X minutes. That’d give fresh comments a chance to compete.

~~~
Varcht
When a discussion is interesting enough for me to want to follow it, I will
search the page for "minutes ago" to find the newest posts. It might be nice
if new posts were highlighted for some amount of time.

~~~
insin
I have a user script for that [1]. If you visited a story's comments before,
it will highlight new comments and can auto-collapse threads without new
comments. Otherwise, it gives you a slider you can use to highlight the X most
recent comments.

[1] [https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/18066-hn-comment-
trees](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/18066-hn-comment-trees)

