HN Explorer

Ask PG/HN: Is HN approaching Eternal September?

7 points by riskish ↗ HN
From Hacker News wikipedia article,

"The site was created by Paul Graham in February 2007. Initially it was called Startup News or occasionally News.YC. On August 14, 2007 it became known by its current name.[4] It developed as a project of his company Y Combinator, functioning as a real-world application of the Arc programming language which Graham co-developed.[5][6][7] The intention was to recreate a community similar to the early days of Reddit.[8] Graham has stated he hopes to avoid the Eternal September that results in the general decline of intelligent discourse within a community.[9][10][11]"

I posted this earlier this morning, but deleted it. I know PG posted, but I'm curious what state we're at right now and thought I'd ask. PG, do you think HN has reached an "Eternal September" already, or only approaching it? I'm curious to hear from people who have been with the site since the beginning and enjoyed it at its highest points of delivering favorable content. It does seem a little different to me than it did early on.

What can we do to keep the quality high..? My first thought is positive guidelines to focus on (just a few, see Forrst.com's guidelines), ideas that delivered us the best material/discussions anyways, just put them up so people know.

If it was the small community that is missed, that might be hard to fix.

5 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 55.5 ms ] thread
pg
What do you mean, your post "got deleted?" When moderators kill stuff, they mark it as dead, not deleted. Did you not delete your post yourself?

In answer to your question, I don't think things are hopeless yet. Comment threads are visibly worse, but it's a long way from saying that to saying irretrievable decline has set in.

riskish
PG: Yes, I deleted it, corrected. Sorry.
melling
I wish we could tag articles so they can be filtered. People want to have lots of meta discussions like this [Meta], for example. Every day there are articles trying to inspire people to got for it[Inspiration]. A few [Science] posts. A few [politics], which should be deleted automatically. We also have [Tech] and [Developer].
horser4dish
I've been reading HN anonymously for a few years, and while there's been a decrease in quality, I agree with pg in that all is not lost. The main problem, I believe, is in the quality of submissions. There's a lot more fluff/gossip on the front page (for example, the TechCrunch Facebook Comments rant) that doesn't inspire any real discussion. I think that if the submission quality can be improved, the comments will follow. And on that note, well-written and interesting comments are still fairly common... I think it will be a while yet before those show signs of disappearing altogether.