zlacker

>>solips+(OP)
HN was launched in Feb 07. The complaints that it had jumped the shark began about a year later, when we got a sudden influx of new users after Arrington wrote about us. To measure any possible decline I created an alternative version of the frontpage that only counted the votes of users who signed up in the first year:

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

As you can see, it's still not much different from the regular frontpage, which is encouraging.

The median comment is probably not as good as it was several years ago, nor as civil, but things aren't dramatically worse, partly because the sorting of comments (which I've tweaked a fair amount) means the lame ones are less visible.

HN traffic roughly doubles each year. That growth rate shows no sign of decreasing. If it continued we'd have 32x the traffic in 5 years. We currently get a bit over 80k unique visitors on a typical weekday. 32x that is 2.6 million. It seems overoptimistic to expect the site could grow to that size and still be bearable to use. So probably either the growth rate is going to have to decrease, or HN will be destroyed. I'll do my best to make sure it's not the latter.

>>pg+T
If HN has jumped the shark, what's the next hip spot?