5 ms·

hn owes a lot of it's success to it's small audience. simply put, this site would go down in flames fast if it attracted a larger crowd. all of the complex faci

hn owes a lot of it's success to it's small audience. simply put, this site would go down in flames fast if it attracted a larger crowd. all of the complex facilities of a site like digg or slashdot come from trying bubble up relevant content to a wide audience

jacquesm 16y ago
That nails it exactly, when slashdot and digg were small they felt just like HN does today (well, maybe digg not, but reddit certainly did). Digg always was more mainstream oriented. The biggest turn-off for me on digg is not so much the complexity of the site but the level of the discussion.
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  To be fair, it's possible to build a fairly good community in a smaller subreddit. The larger ones have those problems, but it seems like most small sized subreddits actually work out pretty well. Still, I find myself gradually spending more and more time here and less and less time and reddit. I think if I didn't mod a few subreddits there, I'd pretty much have solely switched to HN.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    That's probably true, and in fact underscores the point even further, smaller == better.
    - eru 16y ago
      I'd say, small is good. Because smaller might lead to too small.