What I've Learned from Hacker News

February 2009

Hacker 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.

Growth

When 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.

Dilution

Users 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.
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