Poll: What is the fuel for Hacker News' success?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=921881

by amichail • 17 years ago

12 24 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

dabent• 17 years ago

Where else am I going to find a pile of articles on math, Erlang, Lisp, etc? I've really expanded my horizons from my usual Enterprise Java experience and have developed a full website from CSS to the database to user management using a lot of what I've learned here.

PG's influence has drawn a lot of really bright people here. Sure there are silly comments, some articles that don't seem important to me, but overall I come here just about every day to see what new gem someone has found.

amichail• 17 years ago

PG's influence has drawn a lot of really bright people here.

Could you be specific about the influence? If there were no funding by PG et al., would this be the same kind of place?

nahumfarchi• 17 years ago

I think he influenced this community through his essays, and without them this place wouldn't exist.

mbrubeck• 17 years ago

I've heard of Y Combinator and Hacker News not because I'm seeking funding but because I've been reading Graham's essays ever since "A Plan for Spam" made the rounds in 2002. I actually am working at a startup now, but I wasn't when I started reading. In my case at least the cause and effect were just the opposite - pg and HN were part of what convinced me to seek out and join startups.

philwelch• 17 years ago

Let's look at a cross section of typical HN topics:

-Startups

-Web applications

-High-level, often functional programming languages with sometimes fringe appeal

Looks like almost a complete overlap with the topics PG writes about. I never used Digg or Reddit heavily, but on Slashdot the emphasis was more towards open source, science fiction, privacy, and YRO.

DanielBMarkham4• 17 years ago

It's the daily Amichail poll. Yikes!

Could we add "provides a forum for talking with people doing what you want to do?"

Because I'm not here for YC, I'm not here to promote my startup, and I'm not here really to contribute. I'm here to bounce ideas off of people who are a few steps ahead of me in the startup game and to listen to the type of things they talk about.

DanielBMarkham4• 17 years ago

And I'd like to add, with the influx of so many good and kind people who are not really doing anything but dreaming about startups (or not even that), the signal-to-noise ratio has understandably decreased dramatically.

I hope I put that diplomatically enough.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

Though it's worth noting that Daniel has definitely contributed a whole lot more signal than noise :)

ellyagg• 17 years ago

Hacker News' purpose is not only to bounce ideas off of other startup founders, so if you're reading that signal meter, it will naturally be a bit noisy.

From the guidelines:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

edw519• 17 years ago

Hope it's not too late to add a few more choices:

  - Learn new things.
  - Engage in meaningful discussions.
  - Meet like minded people.
  - Find out what others think.

bbg• 17 years ago

Procrastination

heiti• 17 years ago

I think the fuel is that people here tend to be pragmatic. They talk about technologies because lots of them use them to put food on the table(or plan to start doing that) so they think of them from a different perspective than the usual flamewar style. I personally like to read comments from people who actually try to use different technologies in the real world(you could say to make money) rather than someone with a motivation to sell or evangelize it for whatever reason.

kdiehl• 17 years ago

- Keep a finger on the pulse on what's new - grow old more slowly - keep stimulating the mind to encourage new idea generation - and of course - procrastinating

GavinB2• 17 years ago

There are really two questions here.

The first: why did Hacker News start so successfully? 1) A built in group of YC founders to initially populate it. 2) A famous creator with a large following. 3) The strong encouragement of YC applicants to be involved. 4) A clearly defined purpose.

Second: why has it grown so well and continued in its success? 1) Clear guidelines for behavior. 2) Very involved moderation, but without opinion-based censorship. 3) A proliferation of YC-clones and a national increase of interest in entrepreneurship.

And then there's the final question: What's wrong with Hacker News? 1) After a certain point you level max. There are loads of people here that I could learn a lot from, but the forum is greatly limited and becomes repetitive. The reason new members think that it's devolving is not that HN is changing, but that they themselves are learning. 2) No discussion lasts longer than two days, and all discussions are based around other peoples' news--i.e. reactionay. 3) Thoughtful self-posts are discouraged both by the guidelines and by the unreadable light gray font.

alex_c• 17 years ago

1) After a certain point you level max. There are loads of people here that I could learn a lot from, but the forum is greatly limited and becomes repetitive. The reason new members think that it's devolving is not that HN is changing, but that they themselves are learning.

That's a very interesting point, I never thought of it that way - but it feels right.

So what's the next level?

GavinB2• 17 years ago

Longer conversations. A comment thread trailing out to the end of the page kills conversations.

How to do this effectively is a largely unsolved problem. Blogs, forums, aggregators, etc each have their own strengths and weaknesses.

dasht• 17 years ago

I'm kind of new here. I don't quite like any of the choices in the poll. I think the elements of HN's winningness are:

a) Paul Graham gets good PR and often says interesting things low on pure hype and high in thoughtful content (in a kind of feedback loop).

b) PG and YC are pretty good community builders, e.g., with Startup School.

c) There is money on the table but the table is only open to certain kinds of nerds / intellectuals.

So that selects who might come and read / contribute to HN. Then:

d) The software that runs the infrastructure has some pretty excellent design elements. It's minimalist and fast. The "new" firehose is perfect for coffee breaks. The point system, unlike most in the world, seems to give helpful feedback and keep "noise" to a minimum.

A lot of it is attitude, I think. There's PG's general attitude. There's the attitude of the types YC has a history of funding. These seem to me to set a kind of high bar for submissions and comments in terms of the quality of the informativeness of them and the good natured, let's all cooperate and marvel at stuff and learn kind of spirit of the thing.

e) It's a gift to the community that joins it rather than something that has to make money. It seems to display no greater (or lesser) ambition than to be good at being what it is.

-t

nathanwdavis• 17 years ago

Is HN a success? What is the measure of success?

techiferous• 17 years ago

I'm a reddit refugee.

Chirag• 17 years ago

Thanks to HN, I now maintain only 10 rss feeds. :) and meet a lot of intelligent folks.

Poll: What is the fuel for Hacker News' success?

Related Stories