Hacker News Reader

Comment by sethjohn | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see growth that is both slow and consistent. I always figure websites are either exploding or imploding. Do many sites grow this slowly, or is there something unique about YC news?

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I think the graph is a little misleading, because of the short timeframe. It looks like news.yc grew by a factor of 1.5 in the last 4mo - that's actually pretty fast, 340% per year.

The graph has 2x the aspect ratio of graphs we're used to looking at. If it were the usual shape, growth would look twice as steep. Also, the giant spike in the middle expands the scale.

Here's the same data with a more usual aspect ratio and scale:

http://ycombinator.com/images/ycnews-4mo-v2.png

I don't know what your ultimate goals with news.yc are, but I like the site how it is. Unfortunately, as has been seen at reddit and digg, the bigger the site gets, the lower the quality of the posts and conversations (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September ). While I appreciate that you want to see growth, I'd hate for it to turn into yet another collection of amazing pictures. I'm happy with the high quality crowd of 4000 daily ips. I don't know what the tipping point would be, but if it doubled or tripled from here I have a feeling the quality of posts would drop significantly or the initial community will have to be more active in voting/moderating posts.

Regards.

The ultimate goal is to make it useful for everyone interested in (computer) startups. That may mean low tens of thousands of users; probably no more.

We have a bunch of editors who kill offtopic links. So far that seems to be keeping the site focused.

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