What I've Learned from Hacker News

[What I've Learned from Hacker News]

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| February 2009Hacker News was two years
old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an
application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future
Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken
up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've
learned so much from working on it.GrowthWhen we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600
daily uniques. It's since grown to around 22,000. This growth
rate is a bit higher than I'd like. I'd like the site to grow,
since a site that isn't growing at least slowly is probably dead.
But I wouldn't want it to grow as large as Digg or Reddit—mainly
because that would dilute the character of the site, but also because
I don't want to spend all my time dealing with scaling.I already have problems enough with that. Remember, the original
motivation for HN was to test a new programming language, and
moreover one that's focused on experimenting with language design,
not performance. Every time the site gets slow, I fortify myself
by recalling McIlroy and Bentley's famous quote

The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special
cases.

and look for the bottleneck I can remove with least code. So far
I've been able to keep up, in the sense that performance has remained
consistently mediocre despite 14x growth. I don't know what I'll
do next, but I'll probably think of something.This is my attitude to the site generally. Hacker News is an
experiment, and an experiment in a very young field. Sites of this
type are only a few years old. Internet conversation generally is
only a few decades old. So we've probably only discovered a fraction
of what we eventually will.That's why I'm so optimistic about HN. When a technology is this
young, the existing solutions are usually terrible; which means it
must be possible to do much better; which means many problems that
seem insoluble aren't. Including, I hope, the problem that has
afflicted so many previous communities: being ruined by growth.DilutionUsers have worried about that since the site was a few months old.
So far these alarms have been false, but they may not always be.
Dilution is a hard problem. But probably soluble; it doesn't mean
much that open conversations have "always" been destroyed by growth
when "always" equals 20 instances.But it's important to remember we're trying to solve a new problem,
because that means we're going to have to try new things, most of
which probably won't work. A couple weeks ago I tried displaying
the names of users with the highest average comment scores in orange.
[1]
That was a mistake. Suddenly a culture that had been more
or less united was divided into haves and have-nots. I didn't
realize how united the culture had been till I saw it divided. It
was painful to watch.
[2]So orange usernames won't be back. (Sorry about that.) But there
will be other equally broken-seeming ideas in the future, and the
ones that turn out to work will probably seem just as broken as
those that don't.Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is
that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior
you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out
to be surprisingly malleable. If people are
expected to behave
well, they tend to; and vice versa.Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad
people, because they feel uncomfortably constrained in a place where
they have to behave well. But this way of keeping them out is
gentler and probably also more effective than overt barriers.It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to
community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad
behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of
graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I
was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that
made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was
miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened
there, and the transformation was equally dramatic.I'm not criticizing Steve and Alexis. What happened to Reddit
didn't happen out of neglect. From the start they had a policy of
censoring nothing except spam. Plus Reddit had different goals
from Hacker News. Reddit was a startup, not a side project; its
goal was to grow as fast as possible. Combine rapid growth and
zero censorship, and the result is a free for all. But I don't
think they'd do much differently if they were doing it again.
Measured by traffic, Reddit is much more successful than Hacker
News.But what happened to Reddit won't inevitably happen to HN. There
are several local maxima. There can be places that are free for
alls and places that are more thoughtful, just as there are in the
real world; and people will behave differently depending on which
they're in, just as they do in the real world.I've observed this in the wild. I've seen people cross-posting on
Reddit and Hacker News who actually took the trouble to write two
versions, a flame for Reddit and a more subdued version for HN.SubmissionsThere are two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs
to avoid: bad stories and bad comments. So far the danger of bad
stories seems smaller. The stories on the frontpage now are still
roughly the ones that would have been there when HN started.I once thought I'd have to weight votes to keep crap off the
frontpage, but I haven't had to yet. I wouldn't have predicted the
frontpage would hold up so well, and I'm not sure why it has.
Perhaps only the more thoughtful users care enough to submit and
upvote links, so the marginal cost of one random new user approaches
zero. Or perhaps the frontpage protects itself, by advertising what type of submission is expected.The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy
to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by
the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon
takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero,
because people vote it up without even reading it.Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site,
the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take
specific measures to prevent it.Hacker News has two kinds of protections against fluff. The most
common types of fluff links are banned as off-topic. Pictures of
kittens, political diatribes, and so on are explicitly banned. This
keeps out most fluff, but not all of it. Some links are both fluff,
in the sense of being very short, and also on topic.There's no single solution to that. If a link is just an empty
rant, editors will sometimes kill it even if it's on topic in the
sense of being about hacking, because it's not on topic by the real
standard, which is to engage one's intellectual curiosity. If the
posts on a site are characteristically of this type I sometimes ban
it, which means new stuff at that url is auto-killed. If a post
has a linkbait title, editors sometimes rephrase it to be more
matter-of-fact. This is especially necessary with links whose
titles are rallying cries, because otherwise they become implicit
"vote up if you believe such-and-such" posts, which are the most
extreme form of fluff.The techniques for dealing with links have to evolve, because the
links do. The existence of aggregators has already affected what
they aggregate. Writers now deliberately write things to draw traffic
from aggregators—sometimes even specific ones. (No, the irony
of this statement is not lost on me.) Then there are the more
sinister mutations, like linkjacking—posting a paraphrase of
someone else's article and submitting that instead of the original.
These can get a lot of upvotes, because a lot of what's good in an
article often survives; indeed, the closer the paraphrase is to

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