

Ask HN: Are we losing all the older members - Maven911

When I look at most of the comments posted, it is usually from people with accounts less than 1 year old and very rarely from accounts over 2 years old. I wonder what gives ?     Could it be that new members simply outnumber the oldies by such a huge factor. Or do people eventually tire of HN
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kls
I don't see the same names around as much, I am not an old old member but I am
well past the two year mark. 2nd gen would probably be a good name for my
group, where people coming on today would be 4th or 5th gen. I read HN from
the early days and took a long time to create an account and start
contributing.

There have been some pretty high profile defections of people that have felt
that HN has changed too much so their is some attrition from some of the old
members who felt that HN represented an elite club. Some say the quality is
worse, some say it is just different in either case the focus has definitely
changed.

In my personally opinion what made me decide to join HN was the self policing
of memes and humor, while I enjoy those things they destroy some of the other
site that had a serious focus on technology and the industry. Also and most
important, HN discourages the "mine is bigger" arguments. To me, that is the
one element of a site like Slashdot or HN that will kill it dead for smart
individuals, it turns them off and makes them look for the exit quickly.

I think so long as that self policing remains, people will come and go and the
focus will change, but smart people will always be attracted to it.

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brudgers
[1.5 year thoughts]

Based on my observations since the Usenet days, over time discussion
boards/lists tend to attract individuals who are generally more inclined on
average to enter discussions than those who formed the initial community.

Incentivizing posts via reward points, etc. probably enhances this tendency --
the regularity with which discussion of the karma threshold for downvotes
occurs is perhaps symptomatic of this.

Finally, long time users are more likely to leave because of changes such as
the hiding of comment scores or the shift in topics or the shift in comment
quality than a new user who experiences no change.

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ABrandt
I've read HN about every day for over 3 years now. It's very much a different
bunch commenting these days. I like to think that the older group has gotten
so busy applying everything they learned here that they no longer have the
time or need to be as active. Perhaps an overly optimistic view, but it beats
worrying about HN becoming reddit.

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tectonic
Given HN's growth, I wouldn't be surprised if new members did vastly outnumber
older members. Power laws and all that.

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benologist
I don't know if they're leaving or not (although probably plenty moved on ...
many of us used to use Slashdot, digg, reddit etc) but at the least they're
going to be heavily outnumbered - these days HN is a big, popular site with
and a highly desirable source of traffic.

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jcr
You should read the following from 'jacquesm'

<http://jacquesmattheij.com/attitude+does+not+scale>

His point about small town versus large city is wonderful.

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glimcat
I lose my passwords periodically and it's easy to get a new account. I post
semi-anonymously anyway.

