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Why is HN not as popular as it used to be?
The other day i came across this site https://hn.curiosity.ai/#/trends. I didn't manage to work out properly how to use it but i analysed a handful of everyday terms. According to the graphs the amount of traffic on hn has experienced a couple of historic declines. this suggests that hn is far less popular then it used to be. I'm a relative newcomer and i like this site so this surprised me. Why is this the case? do you feel the quality of hn has gone down in recent years?
- accrual 4y agoMy account is from 2018 (5 years ago) but I browsed for a couple years before making an account. My limited perspective is that hn is mostly the same if not more popular. There was even a blog post about hn the other day that mentioned coworkers browsing an "orange website" at work and the post felt pretty mainstream (sorry, can't find link). There's still a great deal of very intelligent discussion on some topics. The concept of "don't be the smartest person in the room" is what draws me - I'm rarely the most knowledgeable on any subject here. There's still some low quality comments, "Reddit grade" jokes and such (I'm also an active Redditor), but it doesn't measurably impact the overall quality I associate with hn.
- gladiatr72 4y ago[flagged]
- sacrosanct 4y agoHN might be on the decline, but has always been an oldskool way of getting traffic to your site. It's the only 'growth hack' that is guaranteed to work every time. There are of course, multiple other ways to launch a product / open source project, but HN is fairly reliable.