A recent post on news.YC on the decline of content quality got me thinking about the cause of what happened to Reddit and what’s happening to Hacker News. I saw unique, quirky content at Reddit become replaced by clichés and pictures of cats. And the transformation of news.YC from startup news to hacker news to prog.reddit++.
Overpopulation is a common diagnosis of the change; usually with an argument that all crowds are stupid and so, it follows, is the content they produce. That may be true, but it alone is not the cause of quality degradation. The news.YC site began life as Startup News and at first the front page changed slowly. That is, stories remained on the front page longer, probably due to fewer total number of submissions. But then, as more users joined, the volatility increased as the quality of the front page decreased. The front page was still full of startup-related posts, but much of content was repetitious or weak.
Startup News was becoming lame [1], so PG rebirthed the site as Hacker News. Startup-related content was still welcome, but the focus was now on “news interesting to hackers generally” [2]. The stated reason for the change was “we ourselves were getting a bit bored reading stories about nothing but startups” [3]. I propose that it wasn’t that users were getting bored about startups, but that we were running out of content to share and things to say.
The pool of hacker-related material on the net is larger than that of startup-related material, but the rate of quality content creation is still a limit. Users struggle to find new content to share and our quality measurements become relative.
There are fixes, but the side effects may be undesirable. Here’s one, off the top of my head: let’s slow down. Slow acceleration and low gravity of post rank would make for a less dynamic front page but allow more time for quality content to be generated, found, and submitted. This may be enough to transform Hacker News from an increasingly vapid whirlpool to a concentrated and directed information flow, a mutating hacker journal.
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[1] This was originally “Startup News was dying”, which didn’t say much and sounded like FUD. I’m not happy with “lame”, but it conveys the subjectivity of my statement. The point is that the front page was full of smarmy business development articles, reports that people didn’t die after quitting their jobs, and recounts of random startups throwing parties or being purchased by Google.
[2] http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
[3] see 2