

Is HN Changing? - Growth - jacquesm
http://jacquesmattheij.com/is+HN+changing+-+growth

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Alex3917
My perception is that submission quality is roughly the same, but average
comment quality has been dropping. Maybe the solution is to make comments work
more like submissions, e.g. new top-level comments start out dead and need two
upvotes before they go live. This is essentially how all new stories start
out, and it seems to be working reasonably well.

Also, part of the issue with scaling is that there are some types of comments
that are fine to post when the userbase is small, but that aren't ok to post
as the userbase grows-- even if they add value in some way. So the problem
isn't just coming from new users posting bad comments, it's coming from old
users posting the same comments. So maybe some sort of radical experiment to
try to refocus the discussions wouldn't be such a bad idea, at least to see
how it goes.

~~~
iamelgringo
I've noticed that my comments have been typically getting less points than
they used to. What I've noticed is that when I don't get as much positive
reinforcement (points) as I used to, I'm less inclined to take 30 minutes and
writing and editing a thoughtful comment. It's a downward cycle.

~~~
robryan
This may be because there are more comments on each submission so your comment
may be glanced over instead of being read properly like it would be if there
were only a few comments on something.

The comment system is usually very good but for things like the Google/China
post it is very hard to come back a few hours later and see what's new because
of how things are ordered, I'm sure there would have been a lot of valid
points in that thread which didn't get upvotes.

~~~
Perceval
One of the great features of Scoop code (which runs kuro5hin and DailyKos
among others) is that it can show you what comments are new since the last
time you viewed a store, marking them with a red-colored '[new].' Makes coming
back to an active thread much easier.

~~~
robryan
I'd say that would be one feature useful here, I don't think it would over
complicate the simplicity of things. Maybe it could be factored into the
display order so things that are new since you last looked at a submission
move to the top.

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tialys
The karma inflation says a lot I think. There seems to be a rash of new users
posting less relevant 'link-bait' stories that get voted up for being
edgy/funny, but have little interest to hackers. I've noticed that i've been
far less interested in the front page of HN lately due to most of the links on
the front page being non hacker news or links I already saw on Reddit(!). This
is purely anecdotal however.

~~~
seldo
I for one have got a lot more strict about flagging things that are
interesting but off-topic.

~~~
iamelgringo
I've tried to do that quite a bit, but since PG changed the rules for flagging
last year, it hasn't been nearly as effective.

~~~
grinich
How were the rules changed?

~~~
mbrubeck
Articles with a certain number of points (10 by default in news.arc) can no
longer be removed automatically by flagging. There may have been other changes
too; I don't know.

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pg
Here are the actual traffic stats as of today:
<http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-19jan10.png>

~~~
smokinn
Any idea what caused that huge spike in late August/early September?

~~~
pg
The thread on _why.

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pg
_Interesting is the start of the real growth roughly a year after the launch,
coinciding with a broadening of the scope of HN._

This isn't true. What you're seeing there is the usual holiday dropoff,
followed by the huge bump that happened when Arrington outed us. Actually HN's
growth rate has been pretty consistent throughout. A graph of x^n generally
looks as if it's nearly flat initially and then takes off at some point, but
this is an illusion.

It also isn't true that the change in focus happened then. We changed the site
from "Startup News" to "Hacker News" after 6 months.

~~~
electromagnetic
There appears to be a major dip every Mid-December to January. There also
appears to be a moderate, but much longer, dip starting in May and ending in
July.

I'm guessing this speaks more of the average age of users. I expect users with
children tend to get less online-time around the summer holidays and
especially the Christmas break. I know personally, without children, that I
had much less time to access HN around Christmas.

~~~
pchristensen
Plus college kids

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andreyf
I would love to see a kernel density plot of comments by point value,
hypothesis being that there are a lot more low-point submissions than there
were before. I see a lot of un-thought-out off-the-cuff comments lately: knee-
jerk anti-Chinese sentiments, top comments with obvious flaws in reasoning,
speculation, or just plain immaturity.

I know people have been saying this for years, but this is the first time I'll
say it: I've been avoiding reading news.YC because I don't feel like I learn
anything from the comments anymore. I'd really welcome a return of PG's
orange-names experiment, but with a gradient instead of a binary grouping (to
avoid tribal sentiment).

~~~
jacquesm
Average karma is a meaningless metric.

~~~
andreyf
Meaningless how? In some absolute sense? It's a metric that, like any public
metric, will guide behavior. The question to ask is "how will it guide
behavior?"

The most quick/intuitive explanation is probably the best explanation - I
think it'll make people think twice "is this more insightful than my average
comment?" before hitting Submit. As the community grows, this is exactly what
we need: incentives for commenting less, and reading more.

~~~
jacquesm
Average karma is meaningless because there are many modes of use of HN that
are very useful and that will inherently lead to a very low average karma.

~~~
andreyf
_there are many modes of use of HN that are very useful and that will
inherently lead to a very low average karma_

Such as?

Also, I'm claiming that as a community grows, it's vital for people to post
less often - preferably only on topics regarding which they have something
truly insightful to share. Your counter-claim would need to be stronger: you
need to show that the "modes of use" you speak of are vital to the community,
that there is harm in disincentivising them.

~~~
jacquesm
\- ask HN threads

\- discussions about hacking or start-up related items outside of the
mainstream

~~~
andreyf
_you need to show that the 'modes of use' you speak of are vital to the
community, that there is harm in disincentivising them_

Stating them does not constitute an argument.

------
mortenjorck
Any community that gains a critical mass of users will change. The
interrogatory form of the headline isn't really necessary.

HN will change as it grows, just as did Slashdot, or Reddit, or Digg. It
doesn't have to be a bad thing. YC can try to shape this growth by introducing
features and changing algorithms, and the userbase can try to shape it through
submissions and voting.

As with many things, it's all a question of balance. You don't want to tip
things too far in favor of preserving the old culture lest you scare off
newcomers and stagnate (perhaps Slashdot at some periods in its history), nor
do you want to tip the other way and lose your core users (Digg).

Only time will tell how HN navigates these waters.

------
blasdel
> _Possibly it would be better to extend the length of the 'new' page because
> in practice once something moves to page 2 it is lost. It is very rare that
> something makes it to page 2 without enough upvotes and after that still
> collects enough votes to make it to the homepage, no matter how topical or
> interesting._

I don't think that's true at all. I'm not sure if pg logs enough data to test
this, but I am quite sure that a lot of the popular stuff that makes it to the
front page got there via multiple-submission, not off the new page. It's
fucked if the first submitter is more than a day before the second, but the
usual course is for multiple people to see something their feedreaders around
the same time. This doesn't require fresh content, fresh references to old
content work too.

Because of this, news.yc generally ignores any links that aren't presently
being talked about elsewhere -- it's not the locus of discovery. Metafilter is
the only site like this that manages to really handle it well.

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SamAtt
Nice data. I'd like to see it updated for a few months. I suspect if you do
that you'll see the numbers are even higher than this shows. I think a lot of
people go in and out of activity as their off-line life becomes more or less
complicated.

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CWuestefeld
Nice. Good questions in this specific instance, as well as a good example of
what everyone running a web site should be doing.

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franticromantic
Nice data collection. Conclusions make sense.

