My core point I was indirectly making, as both a founder and advisor, is that in my experience it is frequently easier to give others advice about learning from

My core point I was indirectly making, as both a founder and advisor, is that in my experience it is frequently easier to give others advice about learning from users than to be the one literally dealing with users and making something meaningful of those exchanges. As for the decline of HN, having been around HN long, long time, in my opinion there’s no real pattern, or at least there’s massive amount of randomness that people tend to read into. If you’re interested in interacting with founders on HN, very easy to do, if you’re intentional about it. As for if HN was focused on growth, would it change? - Maybe, though I would like to hope that would be a net positive, not negative. PS - In case you missed it, posted the comment by PG related to HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32918742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32918742