Ask HN: Should we plan for a life after HN?

Change is inevitable, and going to extreme lengths to preserve the current status quo is almost never worth it. Consider the recent death of Twitter, which seemed so real that tweets were being routinely embedded in news articles. I personally spent a lot of time there, but when it became unusable for me I moved on, to discord communities and bluesky. These are not the same, they are not a twitter-replacement per se, but they fill similar niches in my life. This process is normal, and has existed for all of human history. People are adaptable.

I’m old so I have seen many communities come and go. Usenet went from being the go to source for documentation and troubleshooting to a front end for IRC groups. Those IRC groups were great but then died all of a sudden.

It’s even happened with personal communities. For four straight years, my friends and I primarily stayed in contact and shared pictures of our latest adventures on Livejournal. Or hell, I had an entire long term relationship that largely happened because of Twitter.

As those services disappeared, I changed too. Sometimes I found replacements and other times, I found that I don’t need those particular dopamine hits.

But the one thing I do know is that whenever someone started planning a replacement, the world went off in a different direction. My LJ usage was a great example - there were a lot of conversations about replacing it with something else but none of those conversations predicted that an identity required platform like Facebook would replace it. We actually thought that it would be replaced by something even better for privacy. Whoops!!

If dang broke off and started a for-pay site he’d get rich. The numbers are sort of unavoidable. If a million people subscribe to HN and only 1% stayed with him to pay $5/month for the ad-free version to start, it pencils out nicely.

He could easily afford an apprentice, though finding a good one would be tough.

I would love to see that happen be dug before the burnout kills him or drives him batty.

> If HN goes away it's because it's replaced by something else.

Have you tested the site backups? How do you know that dang's backups work? when's the last time they were tested? An act of god could take out the servers that run this place, and their backups, and the site's history and contents would be gone. you'd go to http://news.ycombinator.com and get an error page that says "we're having trouble serving your request." Or worse - no response at all.

Would the site survive hours or days of downtime? would we come flooding back to an empty site and just start filling it back up again after our threads, our /comments, out /favorites, our /highlights were lost? It would be like a death in the family. We might take off, never to come back instead.

This is not to impugn dang's computer skills. I'm sure there's a good plan in place. But you might want your open copy of the pages you want to keep.

This problem has recurred throughout history.

The issue with the "study this person who does it well, take notes, it takes a village!" approach is that that quicky ossifies into a bureaucratic morass of petty tyrants who don't actually understand (or care about) the principles behind whatever that person did. They instead engage in endless rules lawyering about technical minutiae. Some do it simply to feel powerful; others genuinely feel that rules lawyering is helpful.

This becomes self-amplifying as those who actually care about the underlying principles and themes, as opposed to petty legalism, tend to leave the project permanently and go elsewhere. Meanwhile, those who care about and prioritize bureaucratic bickering are attracted to the project, eventually attain a larger share of the powerful positions, and build more of the same.

See the evolution of Wikipedia for a great example of this process in action.