Ask HN: What is causing the major growth in new HN users? • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by codingdave » Wed, May 17, 2023, 11:19 AM UTC

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."

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

#12

Post by anbeliever » Wed, May 17, 2023, 2:26 PM UTC

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:)

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

#13

Post by june_twenty » Wed, May 17, 2023, 10:57 PM UTC

Reddit's drive for engagement has probably driven a certain segment of its userbase away

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

#14

Post by rishikeshs » Thu, May 18, 2023, 4:03 AM UTC

june_twenty wrote: post #13

Reddit's drive for engagement has probably driven a certain segment of its userbase away

This!

L

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

#15

Post by lmedinas » Thu, May 18, 2023, 4:26 PM UTC

jruohonen wrote: post #2

Some speculations: one of the few places left with mostly civil discussion, no algorithms, plain text, no unnecessary user interface distractions, etc.

plus /r/programming is pretty much dead, i guess people moved here.

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

#16

Post by hayst4ck » Fri, May 19, 2023, 7:09 AM UTC

june_twenty wrote: post #13

Reddit's drive for engagement has probably driven a certain segment of its userbase away

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.

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

#17

Post by hayst4ck » Fri, May 19, 2023, 7:18 AM UTC

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.