I Quit Hacker News

I've had high hopes for http://techstartu.ps, but it doesn't really seem to be getting much community traction.

HN has become more and more general news and less technical or startup related over the past couple of years, but the last few months have been especially bad.

It's got significantly less value for me today than it has previously... it just sucks that it's still the only game in town. Now it feels like there's a cult of personality here; that vapid, content-free submissions gather a surprisingly large number of votes. Comments have mostly stayed good, but the reddit lulziness is starting to creep in there as well.

I do think that pg has done an excellent job in making adjustments to the site as it has grown; the rating mechanism on the front page seems especially well tuned, and trolls get [dead]ed very quickly. I think this might just be a symptom of community growth & dilution.

I wonder how much of that is because of the asymmetry in time needed to produce quality content, vs. the time needed to consume that content.

I remember when I made "Diary of a Failed Startup" public. It shot to the top of HN, and the top comment was tptackek's "More posts like this, plz." But that one link was a year of accumulated startup lessons learned, experiences, and emotional reactions to things along my startup journey. And it fell off the HN front page in a day and a half. Just by the numbers, posts like that can only make a small portion of total links submitted.

The same thing when I submitted "Write yourself a Scheme in 48 hours". Shot to the top of Reddit and HN, stayed there for maybe a day. Took 3 months to write. Compare that with the volume of material that can be produced by a blogger who spends a couple hours on each post.

When a new social news site becomes popular, people immediately start submitting all the favorite links they remember from years past. But that's selecting the cream of the crop from the last 15 years of posts. Once the community reaches a steady-state, all of those posts have already been read before, and it takes a long time to produce new ones. Instead of becoming a selection of the best articles published over the last 15 years, it becomes a selection of the best articles published in the last day. The latter will naturally have far less quality than the former.

My personal solution has been to care less about consuming content and more about producing it as I've gotten older. This sorta sucks. Producing interesting content is a long, hard slog where you investigate lots of ideas that nobody wants to hear about before finding one that people do. Consuming it gives you the immediate satisfaction of thinking "Hey, I'm smarter than I was fifteen minutes ago." But ultimately, I'd rather be part of the solution than part of the problem.

(And the irony isn't lost among me that this comment is probably part of the problem, being dashed off in ten minutes or so.)

Most longer content that has been written over a long period of time is going to contain far more value than the average submission. I think in reality what we should really aim for is consuming less and what we do consume is more in depth.

It can be a thankless task at times, given that the longer a piece is the smaller a section of the audience that reads through it is. Those people will get far more value though.

A little while back one of the guys from the YC startup adioso was talking to me about their new version. Someone from techcrunch did a quick 15 minute interview and pushed out a shortish post complete with concept misunderstandings. Another site (which I forget now and can't find) did a real in depth interview and a multiple page write up but probably only grabbed a small fraction of the attention the short error filled techcrunch post would have had.

Why does your solution suck? Producing quality content, even if the attention is short, is far more admirable than consuming social news. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to be learned from reading articles on HN and participating in the discussion, but if you don't apply it then it's nothing more than masturbation.

I'm reminded of some of the recent articles about how the corporate environment needs to adapt to millenials so they can profit from their amazing technology skills of the new generation. It's great that the kids know how to use Twitter and Facebook, and yes there are some nice marketing opportunities there, but let's not kid ourselves: most people are not changing the world with their mobile phones, they're distracting themselves and killing their productivity. In Silicon Valley there is this social pressure to stay on top of technology fads so as not to appear clueless, but a hermit who holes himself up in a cave for a year to work on an invention is much more likely to do something truly interesting than people who are so concerned with staying up to the minute that they're all rehashing the same ideas in rapid cycles with no downtime.