HN user
People weren't leaving because reddit had threaded comments
Please tell me more about why engagement has dropped precipitously. Here I thought it was the superior UI of other sites but I can't wait for you to tell me why I really left.
I agree with you, technical and UX issues are way down the list of reasons why there's less engagement. But I do think it's a contributing factor that they ought to pay attention to.
It's true that the issue is the number of users and interactions, but the difficulty of making any technical improvements is a part of that. Maybe not a huge one but if they never add features that people want that's going to hurt engagement somewhat.
Paying someone to migrate the site to something modern might be cost prohibitive. But there are plenty of MetaFilter users who have the expertise and would happily pitch in to move the site to a modern open source stack. But for years the MetaFilter policy was "we can't accept volunteer labor because (mumble mumble legal something)." So hopefully they'll eventually decide "the fact that programmatic changes take forever is killing us" and do whatever is necessary to make volunteer labor possible.
I guess they could also let volunteers work on ColdFusion, but they might not get many takers.
I traded in my Pixel 4 XL for a 5, and despite the 5's weaknesses that are laid out in the article I'm very happy with the switch. I'm running all the same apps but everything feels smoother. I'm not sure why but I'm not questioning it. And the huge battery is awesome.