
News.YC Growth - pg
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#8dec08
======
davidw
"we'll simply run out of new people the site appeals to."

That means eliminating politics stories, because those:

* Appeal to pretty much anyone with an opinion, including lots of non-hacker types.

* Really suck people in. "Someone is wrong on the internet!"

Look at how many comments there were on the Obama/Broadband story. Were any of
them really that _interesting_? I would expect the hacker mind (at least those
who are not devout followers of the 'keep the government out of it' school) to
have already arrived at the fact that it's some sort of monopoly/oligopoly
situation and to cast about for research on what sorts of policy approaches
might cause what effects, and have what sort of consequences, both positive
and negative. One minute with Google scholar turns up this, for instance:
[http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119176828/abstrac...](http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119176828/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0)
Most likely, someone who actually knows something about economics might be
able to point to others of interest.

But that takes a lot more effort than the simple sorts of debate that tend to
surround those stories.

------
quantumhobbit
The degradation of quality posts/comments is inevitable as news.yc or any
social news site grows. The only thing saving new.yc is the limited appeal of
the subject matter.

This is like moving from a small town to a big city. Someone can be rude to
another person in a big city because more than likely they will never meet a
again. In a small town everyone knows everyone else and word spreads rapidly.
You don't want to act like an ass in a small town because everyone will hear
about it.

In large online communities, karma is supposed to act as an incentive to be
nice and contribute thoughtfully, but it is not as effective as true
reputation among people that you know personally. What the world as a whole
thinks of you is less powerful than what your friends think of you.

A good experiment would be to enforce the small town effect on an online
community. Partition a news site into groups of 100-1000 members. Comments and
submissions would only be visible inside each members subgroup until upvoted
past a certain threshold. With luck members would get to know one another
inside a group and desire each others respect enough to contribute to the
discussion meaningfully. Debates would last for days or weeks instead of an
afternoon as is the case on current news sites. Trolls damage would be
confined to one group at time as well.

~~~
Retric
That sounds like a really interesting idea, why don't you build it?

A few months ago I had an idea for automatically forcing people to submit
story's to sub groups as the sight grows. So it starts as a base line then
it's a Funny, then it's Funny, picture then it's Funny, picture, cat etc. And
at each level people can automatically weigh how much they like each sub
group. Then set the homepage as the average weight people give each sub group.
Then redit started adding sub redits and I realized it was an easy idea to
copy.

~~~
quantumhobbit
I might just try to build it. I don't have too much experience with web
development, but I have some time off for Christmas and that would be a great
way to learn. It sounds like you have spent some time thinking about news
sites. Do you have any recommendations for language/framework/existing open
source code?

~~~
Shamiq
Hey, I'm in the same situation as you. Look for my email in my profile if you
want to work together -- or at least bounce around ideas.

I've got 3 weeks of nothing planned until school re-starts, and by then, who
knows.

------
dcurtis
This is sort of related to the traffic here: a snapshot of my Google Analytics
after having a link on the front page for about three days.

<http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/ga.jpg>

(This is the post, for reference: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388510>
)

~~~
matt1
Off-topic: Kudos on the novel blog design. It's especially interesting how
each of your three posts uses a different layout. The third one -- the black
and red one -- leads me to believe you're either insane or insanely creative.
Anyway, nice job, keep them coming.

~~~
fallentimes
He's definitely both.

------
petercooper
Other interesting data: <http://top.searchyc.com/>

~~~
redorb
I'm a tad sad seeing Techcrunch.com and ValleyInsider.com on the top 10
submitted urls ;( but this is still my number favorite site as far as people
go.

~~~
pg
The list of top submitted sites is not a list of the sites users are most
interested in. In some cases the site owners submit every post, but many never
get enough upvotes to make it onto the front page. To find the sites users are
most interested in, you want not the raw number of posts per site, but the
number that get over some threshold of points.

~~~
chengmi
<http://top.searchyc.com/domains_by_average_points>

Is this a better list?

~~~
mikeyur
What's scary is that 'Hot or Not' is on the list. That is the digg-type stuff
we need to keep out.

But to be honest, I haven't seen a whole lot of 'fluff' in the short period
I've been here.

~~~
byrneseyeview
<http://searchyc.com/submissions/hotornot.com>

It is not 'digg-type stuff'. It's a founder, talking about a successful
startup.

------
jmtame
"Growth can't keep going at this rate forever without ruining the site,
though. Between those two alternatives, we prefer growth to slow down."

I actually agree with you on this, and I wasn't going to say anything, but
I've been a little discouraged by some of the stuff I've seen up-voted lately.
I think Hacker News is a special place and hope to protect the community that
we've built here.

~~~
notdarkyet
I personally don't see the content of the articles degrading as much as the
comments. If anything there seems to be more movement and moderation of the
articles which mostly is an improvement. The thing that I notice is the depth
and quality of the comments. It took me a while to build up enough confidence
to go from a lurker to a member and actually make comments. It was nice to
feel that sense of pressure to make a quality comment that actually adds to
the conversation rather than simply take up space or repeat what another
person has said so that I can make my post.

The moment a social news site begins to degrade in my opinion is when comments
are posted that add little or nothing to advancing or starting conversation
(for example "Modded up for _______", "Really Nice _____" or my favorite "When
I read the title of this post I thought it said ___. I have had too much
________ today")

There was a period where it felt as though the same articles would sit on the
front page all day. The increase in the gravity for old posts and the increase
in total number of posts has caused me (and I would assume others) to become
more active in the site. I think the focus in moderation should be on the
comments to set an example for what is expected.

~~~
pg
Yeah, it's true, comments probably have suffered a bit. It might be possible
to do something about this. Maybe I could use a statistical filter to auto-
detect potentially vapid comments and ask the submitters if they're sure they
want to post them.

~~~
biohacker42
The stupid filter (<http://stupidfilter.org/main/>) is out there, time to
start using it?

------
Shamiq
I get this strange feeling that I may represent a third of all daily hits.

Perhaps I spend too much time here. Something about the company of intelligent
individuals...

~~~
edw519
I imagine we all have this issue from time to time.

Is it because the experience here is so good, or...

Is something in your work "missing" so much that your passion pulls you here
instead.

hn is great, but if it "attracts" you more than your project, then it's time
to take a good hard look at your project.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
It's the community.

I will most likely never release a webapp (I'm an embedded kinda guy), but I
like seeing what others are doing and reading about their insights and
experiences. It's one of the few places I can find a group of smart people
doing something I find interesting.

------
lpgauth
Would be cool to know what the big spikes on the graphs represent.

------
uuilly
meretricious |merəˈtri sh əs|

adjective

1 apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity :
meretricious souvenirs for the tourist trade.

2 archaic of, relating to, or characteristic of a prostitute.

------
robg
In the Just Curious Dept:

Can you provide the number of user accounts?

Have the number of posts also increased 12x fold? The turnover on the new page
seems more like 3-5x from what it used to be.

~~~
robg
Also, any idea what those two huge spikes are at the beginning of August and,
especially, the middle of September?

~~~
pg
Spikes in page views are usually misbehaving crawlers.

------
mattmaroon
The word 'meretricious' has always irked me because if you didn't know what it
meant you might mistake it for a positive one.

Way off-topic I know.

------
ErrantX
Just as a comment. I barely ever read the front page. I check the "new" page
once every couple of hrs (and read/post al that).

The wealth of information is great.. the front page has.. well.. loses it's
interest after a couple of hrs of the day..

------
tsally
I have a query for the userbase: how much do you think the quality of this
site would go down is URLs from Techcrunch were banned?

I suggest that it wouldn't be very much :-).

~~~
pchristensen
TC reviews of startups are the most reliable, in the sense that a) there will
always be one (TC is thorough) and b) the quality and viewpoint is fairly
consistent so they're _more_ valuable because you know the bias, as opposed to
a review from some random site.

~~~
tsally
Somehow I don't accept consistent bias as an acceptable aspect of a review, or
any journalism piece for that matter.

~~~
whatusername
This is the internet. Surely something with a consistent bias is the lesser
evil compared to an unknown bias.

------
Fuca
18,000? I thought this was about 100,000

------
zitterbewegung
So PG's conjecture is there is a equilibrium point of appeal for people part
of this site?

------
volida
the graph doesnt show any signs that the growth will slow down, rather the
contrary.

------
fiaz
compete.com is way off:

[http://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.ycombinator.com/?metri...](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.ycombinator.com/?metric=uv)

