
Ask HN: What do you expect Hacker News to look like in 5 years? - solipsist
Personally, I expect to see the the same orange banner on top and all the simplicity of the current design. Maybe a few functionality tweaks here and there, but the overall appearance will stay the same in my opinion.<p>To let you know, I'm looking for answers that describe the atmosphere and functionality of Hacker News in addition to the appearance.
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pg
HN was launched in Feb 07. The complaints that it had jumped the shark began
about a year later, when we got a sudden influx of new users after Arrington
wrote about us. To measure any possible decline I created an alternative
version of the frontpage that only counted the votes of users who signed up in
the first year:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/classic>

As you can see, it's still not much different from the regular frontpage,
which is encouraging.

The median comment is probably not as good as it was several years ago, nor as
civil, but things aren't dramatically worse, partly because the sorting of
comments (which I've tweaked a fair amount) means the lame ones are less
visible.

HN traffic roughly doubles each year. That growth rate shows no sign of
decreasing. If it continued we'd have 32x the traffic in 5 years. We currently
get a bit over 80k unique visitors on a typical weekday. 32x that is 2.6
million. It seems overoptimistic to expect the site could grow to that size
and still be bearable to use. So probably either the growth rate is going to
have to decrease, or HN will be destroyed. I'll do my best to make sure it's
not the latter.

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redthrowaway
Would you ever consider implementing subreddits? The reddit team has said that
they were implemented in order to help the site scale without losing the small
community feel, and that certainly holds true for some of the smaller, more
focused subreddits.

Alternatively, would you take steps to limit new membership? HN these days is
often mentioned in the same breath as Twitter, Reddit, and Digg by many
bloggers. I don't see that trend stopping any time soon, so if you didn't plan
on implementing subreddits, then something like this might be necessary.

The Eternal September phenomenon has always been fascinating to me, not least
because it is one of the Internet's oldest problems, yet it remains unsolved.
I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on how a community can protect
itself from dilution in this manner. Beyond the ideas expressed in the
following link, did you have any other thoughts? Has anything changed your
mind in the past year?

<http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

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byoung2
I fully expect that in 5 years a good portion of members who are active on
Hacker News today will still not have launched any startups, there will be
plenty of debate over which frameworks/languages are the best, lots of
discussions about how to handle scaling problems, and plenty of threads about
whether it's better to stick with a six-figure job or go the startup route.

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Mz
If the atmosphere and functionality are to continue coping effectively with
the ongoing growth, I think new ground will have to be broken in how to manage
large online communities. The human brain only deals effectively with a
community size of about 150 persons. More than that causes issues (strife).
Most online communities only have somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% to 30%
of members as "active users" to some degree. I don't remember the statistics
as well as I used to, but I think (typically) about 20% are "regular" posters
and another 10% are one-time or very rare posters. I have in the past found
that this meant that a forum with more than about 700 members would be
effectively bumping the ceiling on that 150 person "community" mark. What I
have seen is that this tended to cause spin-offs in some fashion or another.

My thought is that older cultures tend to be more formal as a means to
effectively cope with the larger-than-150 community size of developed cities.
I don't know how to apply that to the culture of an online community but I
think that is where there is hope for effectively coping with the size of HN.
This is the largest forum I have ever participated in. I know there are some
other large forums out there, but I don't know how they compare, size/traffic-
wise, to HN. In terms of culture, my general understanding is they tend to be
less polite.

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iuguy
I don't see much change in terms of appearance over the next five years. It's
unlikely there'll be a need.

Where I think HN will need to change significantly is in the way submissions
are handled. Currently you need a score of about 4 - 7 in the first hour to
make the front page, as the number of users increase, the score threshold
increases with it. HN is at the higher end in terms of front page quality, but
there's already a lot of good stuff that gets missed. Ultimately that will be
compounded as things go on unless something is done to cope with it.

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idheitmann
HN is a great reference library as well as a news source and a community. The
'front page' is great for keeping your finger on the pulse, but what about
more tools for finding and keeping up with subsets of the astronomical amount
of information.

For example, what if you could look at all postings that have at least 10 but
fewer than 30 ups? What if you could look at the posts with the most ups of
all time? A data-mining point of view might accentuate the depth of the
knowledge represented here.

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coderdude
Given the current trends in migration from other communities, I wouldn't be
surprised if Paul is pressured into adding a "tl;dr" link to the header. ;)

