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Paul Graham commented on this in an essay, back in 2009: > So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site t
by veddox 8y ago
Paul Graham commented on this in an essay, back in 2009:
> So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there.
(http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)
- krapp 8y agoPG's view on this is, frankly, odd and kind of condescending. No one is drawn to a particular website merely because of the stylesheet or UI, it's always because the content and the community interests them - vapid and mainstream that content may be. There would be no rush of mainstream users to Hacker News with a more modern layout, nor would mainstream users be repelled by its simplicity. Mainstream users don't come here because they don't even know the site exists and if they did, it would have nothing to interest them. Yet apparently PG thinks most web users are basically magpies drawn to shiny things.
- gnode 8y ago> No one is drawn to a particular website merely because of the stylesheet or UI I was. The minimalism of the site has always appealed to me. Internet forums are not only their content and community, but also their mechanics and their rules.
- krapp 8y agoBut if you had encountered the same community with the same level of discourse on a site with a modern layout, would that really have mattered?
- pixl97 8y agoIf the modern layout was slow, yes. There are a lot of sites with good content I don't visit. Much of the reason is they'll eat my mobile battery, data, or both. If I'm in a place with poor signal I can still browse HN in general. The snappyness and content keep me coming back.
- krapp 8y agoFair enough, but it seems what PG was describing was aesthetics, not necessarily performance.
- gnode 8y agoThat's a very hypothetical question. I think the architecture of a communal website shapes its community (after all, it exists before the community). The design decisions of HN are distinct from say, Reddit: the are no subreddits, comment karma isn't visible, stricter rules, etc. The less-is-more rationale attracts a certain kind of personality.