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

4 points by SudarshanP ↗ HN
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?

7 comments

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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
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!

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 :-)

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?