Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Having a small community and not being well-known are not advantages.

They try to say that your voice will be comparatively louder and you'll get more attention from the developers, but in a large community, you get attention from the community as well. The only thing you can get from using an unpopular project is an adrenaline rush from living on the edge.

View on HN

Having a small community and not being well-known are not advantages. I am not sure I can agree with this. Smaller communities are often nicer. Think of all the talk around here of growing pains, loss of niceness, comparisons to Reddit or Dig, eternal September, etc. that have come about as the community grows.

That's one way in which a discussion community like HN is different from an open-source product-user community.

Open source projects have a very similar problem. When there were 20 people in the Linux community they could all be considered kernel hackers and communicate amongst themselves, now that there are millions they can't assume every member of the community is a kernel hacker, the 'kernel hacker' ability of the average community member has fallen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com