What I've Learned from Hacker News -->
February 2009
Hacker News was two years<br>old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an<br>application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future<br>Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken<br>up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've<br>learned so much from working on it.
Growth
When we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600<br>daily uniques. It's since grown to around 22,000. This growth<br>rate is a bit higher than I'd like. I'd like the site to grow,<br>since a site that isn't growing at least slowly is probably dead.<br>But I wouldn't want it to grow as large as Digg or Reddit—mainly<br>because that would dilute the character of the site, but also because<br>I don't want to spend all my time dealing with scaling.
I already have problems enough with that. Remember, the original<br>motivation for HN was to test a new programming language, and<br>moreover one that's focused on experimenting with language design,<br>not performance. Every time the site gets slow, I fortify myself<br>by recalling McIlroy and Bentley's famous quote
The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special<br>cases.
and look for the bottleneck I can remove with least code. So far<br>I've been able to keep up, in the sense that performance has remained<br>consistently mediocre despite 14x growth. I don't know what I'll<br>do next, but I'll probably think of something.
This is my attitude to the site generally. Hacker News is an<br>experiment, and an experiment in a very young field. Sites of this<br>type are only a few years old. Internet conversation generally is<br>only a few decades old. So we've probably only discovered a fraction<br>of what we eventually will.
That's why I'm so optimistic about HN. When a technology is this<br>young, the existing solutions are usually terrible; which means it<br>must be possible to do much better; which means many problems that<br>seem insoluble aren't. Including, I hope, the problem that has<br>afflicted so many previous communities: being ruined by growth.
Dilution
Users have worried about that since the site was a few months old.<br>So far these alarms have been false, but they may not always be.<br>Dilution is a hard problem. But probably soluble; it doesn't mean<br>much that open conversations have "always" been destroyed by growth<br>when "always" equals 20 instances.
But it's important to remember we're trying to solve a new problem,<br>because that means we're going to have to try new things, most of<br>which probably won't work. A couple weeks ago I tried displaying<br>the names of users with the highest average comment scores in orange.<br>[1]<br>That was a mistake. Suddenly a culture that had been more<br>or less united was divided into haves and have-nots. I didn't<br>realize how united the culture had been till I saw it divided. It<br>was painful to watch.<br>[2]
So orange usernames won't be back. (Sorry about that.) But there<br>will be other equally broken-seeming ideas in the future, and the<br>ones that turn out to work will probably seem just as broken as<br>those that don't.
Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is<br>that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior<br>you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out<br>to be surprisingly malleable. If people are<br>expected to behave<br>well, they tend to; and vice versa.
Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad<br>people, because they feel uncomfortably constrained in a place where<br>they have to behave well. But this way of keeping them out is<br>gentler and probably also more effective than overt barriers.
It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to<br>community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad<br>behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of<br>graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I<br>was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that<br>made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was<br>miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened<br>there, and the transformation was equally dramatic.
I'm not criticizing Steve and Alexis. What happened to Reddit<br>didn't happen out of neglect. From the start they had a policy of<br>censoring nothing except spam. Plus Reddit had different goals<br>from Hacker News. Reddit was a startup, not a side project; its<br>goal was to grow as fast as possible. Combine rapid growth and<br>zero censorship, and the result is a free for all. But I don't<br>think they'd do much differently if they were doing it again.<br>Measured by traffic, Reddit is much more successful than Hacker<br>News.
But what happened to Reddit won't inevitably happen to HN. There<br>are several local maxima. There can be places that are free for<br>alls and places that are more thoughtful, just as there are in the<br>real world; and people will behave differently depending on which<br>they're in, just as they do in the real world.
I've observed...