HN Explorer

Ask HN: What is causing the major growth in new HN users?

11 points by mcgyver ↗ HN
This was brought up by someone some months back [1] and was judged by dang to be a spike due to YC applicants. Assuming, the the data here [2] is accurate, what is the explanation for new user growth and are the new users causing any issues?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35009073

[2] https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/user-analysis

16 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 48.6 ms ] thread
jruohonen
Some speculations: one of the few places left with mostly civil discussion, no algorithms, plain text, no unnecessary user interface distractions, etc.
poly_morphis
But why now and not a few years ago? The spike appears to have started at the beginning of this year which is most intriguing to me.
jruohonen
No idea. Might be due to the AI hype? Or worse: bots?
mcgyver
I went hunting for stats of topic trends on HN as the whole AI thing has gone bananas. Looking at the "ChatGPT" keyword chart [1] the volume is crazy and seems to line up time wise. It is a correlation but not sure if it is the right one.

[1] https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/keyword-analysis

lmedinas
plus /r/programming is pretty much dead, i guess people moved here.
ggm
Leakage into other fora, and time: anything which lasts gets known.

There's a lot of retro going on atm: typewriter collecting, pinball, what's old is new and HN is quite old school.

ano88888
LLM bots?
mcgyver
Bots of some kind crossed my mind. I find it interesting there has been no announcements from dang about the change in behaviour - unless I've just missed them.
iExploder
LLM chatbots, AI hype, .. rustaceans :) sorted in order from most to least annoying
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codingdave
I don't know where it is coming from, but it seems correlated to the chart on the 'Overview' page titled: "How many text stories created per month?"

I have definitely noticed a large influx of posts which are basically blog posts posted to HN. No questions, no links, nothing shared, just... someone posting a few paragraphs of their own thoughts. So while I've been around long enough to know that eventually the community tends to settle into its own norms... things have felt different recently.

None of this answers your question, so this was a lot of words to say, "I don't know, but am interested in the answer."

anbeliever
Too many startups doing developer tools? And HN is the best place to each to the developers? GitHub could become a good developer focused social network, until then HN is the best:)
june_twenty
Reddit's drive for engagement has probably driven a certain segment of its userbase away
hayst4ck
It is probably in some way related to reddit. Reddit is just getting too gross. The signal to noise of educated people sharing interesting content vs "Americas funniest home videos" posts is just getting worse and worse.

It would be interesting to see if there are any major reddit changes correlated with the spike.

I think reddit occasionally puts me in a TikTok-ified home page a/b group which I find detestable.

I think sometime in the last year reddit also implemented "sign in to read" and locks you out of reading pages unless you go to old.reddit.com or sign in (for Ukraine content in particular). That just about ended reddit for me, and when they remove old.reddit.com, that will end reddit for me.

hayst4ck
Reddit's crapification was definitely my first instinct, but I think it might be the ChatGPT buzz.

That's assuming the users are legitimate, it's possible they are not legitimate. The idea that state actors are leveraging technology to manipulate online discourse is definitely worth falsifying.