

Ask HN: After e^x growth, what aspects of HN are changing? - SudarshanP

Just out of curiosity, I looked at http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/news.ycombinator.com Alexa stats for "max" duration show a very sharp increase from 2009 levels. I was a bit surprised!!! Is HN aiming towards becoming a reddit or digg? How will the HN community evolve during this exponential growth phase?
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icey
Things that have changed:

    
    
      * Stories have a much tougher time making it to the front page
      * It's more rare to recognize all of the people in thread comments
      * The level of discourse has slightly degraded
      * The focus of the site has become more general-interest and
        less startup or hacker related
    

Things that have not changed:

    
    
      * New people claiming the site is turning into reddit
      * Hand-wringing about the direction of HN

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SudarshanP
Funny :) - I was just checking <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>
... and bumped into: "If your account is less than a year old, please don't
submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-
noob illusion.)"

Oops "semi-noob illusion" ;-). I did not imply a complaint... was just
wondering about its growth!

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pg
Alexa says traffic has grown 4x since the start of 2009. In fact it's been a
little over 2x. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1404759>

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Jun8
Wow, this is amazing. I guess the huge increase has resulted from increasing
media coverage of YCombinator and its alumni.

I'm here now for close to a year, I haven't felt any major changes in site
"flavor" except for the fact that the diversity of submissions have increased.
However, the core HN reader group is quite successful in prevention too much
dilution of content.

One reason I don't think HN will go the way of the reddit/digg/etc is due to
this dedicated, close-knit community, that is tied to HN in ways quite
different from, say, reddit's community is tied to reddit. A coarse comparison
could be the Wikipedia admin community perhaps. Also having "benevolent
dictators for life" like PG helps :-)

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SudarshanP
<http://hackermonthly.com/> was awesome! What other initiatives have aimed at
unearthing the hidden wisdom buried inside HN?

~~~
ph0rque
<http://news.ycombinator.com/ask> for queries to the HN community

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SudarshanP
What studies have been conducted about the news covered by HN/its users/its
karma system etc.? Is crawling of HN discouraged? Is there an archive of all
HN data available somewhere for download? I noticed an "Ask YC" archive at
<http://ask.searchyc.com/> Are there other such places or lists?

