I feel the same. IH was a site I visited on a daily basis but now I rarely remember of checking it even once a week. I thought being acquired by stripe would be a great thing for Indie Hackers but apparently it wasn't the case.
It would be interesting to read a blog post by Courtland where he shares engagement/views statistics pre and post the decision to make the forum the home page. Maybe there already is such a blog post, but if there is, I wasn't able to find it ;)... But even if engagement increased significantly, I wonder whether that's a good metric to optimize for, for a site such as IH? As it stands, I don't understand the need to pivot if a site is successful.
1. What works for others won't necessarily work for you 2. Forum participants are rarely anonymous. Normally, you'll find a profile, comment history and product (with verified revenues) attached to that participant.
>> As it stands, I don't understand the need to pivot if a site is successful.
I see this sentiment (and the rest of your comment) expressed often on HN regarding Indie Hackers. Maybe you (and others) should take a step back and ask/work out what Courtland is trying to achieve with Indie Hackers, before criticising how he goes about it.
We've experimented with a variety of different homepages, including the old list of interviews, and also a mixed homepage that included the forum + interviews + podcast. Ultimately, there isn't one answer that works for everyone. However, I can say with confidence that more people get bored of reading interview after interview and stop coming back than is the case with the community forum. If I were to simply revert to the old IH, it wouldn't be long before there was another thread like this one, but with a different subset of people asking me to move the community back to the fore.
I think your question about the value of metrics is an important one. Why attempt to grow at all? My thinking on this is simple: as long as IH remains an inspirational and educational resource that's a net positive for those it reaches, then the world is better off if it reaches more people.
The risk of course is that growth involves change, and that change might be for the worse if we're not careful. This is something I think about constantly, and one of the reasons feedback threads like this one are helpful.