8 ms·
Ask HN: Should we plan for a life after HN?
While reading about the death of Omegle, I came across this comment and it sent a chill down my spine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38201035 ("Omegles come and go, but "[how is it] hacker news?" is here forever.")
Although the comment was not necessarily about the longevity of HN itself, it made me realise that HN, like any other online forum, has a finite lifespan. At some point it will end (although that seems like a distant possibility right now).
Should we plan for this? I.e. building some sort of mirror platform with the same profiles, same data and as much of the algorithm as possible, with the agreement that we meet there should HN unexpectedly meets its demise.
I understand that a huge part of why HN works is dang. I'm unsure how we mirror him though.
- lordfrito 3y agoI worry about this myself. I feel like HN is the last refuge of what the old Internet was supposed to be like. I'm not sure it can be replicated. The future of the Internet seems to me to be small private "hidden" communities and mega platforms filled with garbage. No room for a middle Maybe a paid platform?
- hliyan 3y agoEither a private, paid platform, or a Wikipedia-like foundation that relies on donations.
- repelsteeltje 3y agoI'm also tempted to start by thinking about the moneys — after all it's hard to be sustainable without revenue. But that's only part of the problem and money is by no means a solution. Indeed the revenue streams discovered by Google and Meta — while responsible for the financial success of those companies — are also responsible for disinformation and degrading quality from user perspective. If the thing that makes HN enjoyable is the community, maybe we should see it more as a commons and worry about how it is/can/should be governed. Taking Wikipedia as an example, if the worst that comes out of the money problem is an occasional desperate plea from Jimmy Wales begging for a small donation, I'm perfectly happy. Would it be possible to foster a similar community using a platform like Mastodon? If, yes — it might already exist... Anyone have a pointer?
- tekla 3y ago> the last refuge of what the old Internet was supposed to be like. What, how? HN is one of the most squeaky clean - corpo - heavily moderated sites with a extreme bubble centered around SV tech. Its basically the exact opposite of the old internet.
- Auracle 3y agoIt’s primarily filled with intelligent people interested in technology. Before smartphones, that was the primary population of many (most?) websites.
- chx 3y ago> intelligent people [...] was the primary population of many (most?) websites. Oh sweet summer child.
- derefr 3y agoGP post is correct in the general sense that the Internet used to be a thing only accessible to researchers at major universities; and therefore a place where everyone could be assumed to have some basic level of technical knowledge (if not common sense), and to consider themselves "an intellectual" of some kind or another. GP post is technically incorrect, though, in that during this time, the web didn't exist yet. The tech folks were on Usenet and IRC, not on "websites." (In fact, the creation of the web and "Eternal September" basically coincided: the web was the killer app that got regular people to sign up for Internet service. Despite HTML being designed for scientific-research use-cases, the web that actually formed in practice was "for normals" from the very beginning.)
- chx 3y agoI came online, completely accidentally with the Eternal September crowd, we beta tested NCSA Mosaic mostly as a Usenet reader 'cos there were almost no websites yet. Still it was not only researchers, "Eternal" September is a reaction to earlier Septembers with a large influx of newbies. And even then there flame wars were a thing.
- justinkramp 3y agoAs much as I like my Internet free as in beer, I do think that in order to transition from ad-supported content platforms, some form of micropayment or subscription model works best to support creators and bastions of intelligent discourse. I don't mind chipping in for content, (ie independent reporters on substack, local NPR station, Wikipedia), the value exchange is positive for me.
- chx 3y agoDon't worry, existing entrenched tech giants will kill this idea before it could take root: this week Facebook started offering a subscription in the EU instead of using your data for ads. They however ask for 10 EUR (and 5000 HUF in Hungary which is 13 EUR) which is far , far more than what anyone sane wants to pay for FB. So they can go back to the regulators and say, see, no one wants to pay for this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- derefr 3y ago> The future of the Internet seems to me to be small private "hidden" communities and mega platforms filled with garbage. What you're describing are two attractor-points in community design space, for communities that don't put any effort into fixing their position elsewhere in the design space. • Managed-membership communities don't grow by default, because by default they don't advertise / recruit members. So they have strong cultures, but they're "hidden." • Unmanaged-membership communities start off small and nice, sort of like closed-membership communities; but then they grow "by adsorption" — diluting the original spirit of the community with greater and greater numbers of people who are less and less committed to the premise of the community. Until the community is a generalized nothing, a random sampling of all of humanity. A managed-membership community that advertises / actively recruits could be nice, but it would have to first also avoid the third natural attractor-pole in community design: becoming a cult-of-personality-driven money-making scheme.
- safety1st 3y agoThe tildeverse? SDF? Mastodon? Slashdot? The chans? Lobsters? Gemini? Superhighway84 (not sure if this one's still alive?) Undernet or Libera on IRC? I guess it depends on exactly how picky you are about pattern matching to "the old Internet," but a lot of that stuff feels like a throwback to the early Internet or even BBS era... none of it is mega platforms and most of it isn't really hidden... all of it is pretty cool... HN fills a great niche to be sure Hold your nose and throw in a few of the better run subreddits until Lemmy takes off... And WordPress is now paying a guy to work full-time on ActivityPub integration, hold on to your hats ...!
- nullindividual 3y ago> it made me realise that HN, like any other online forum, has a finite lifespan Everything we touch has a finite lifespan, and I don't think that's the important thing to think about. I would further comment, but the guidelines[0] last point says not to. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- JohnFen 3y ago> Everything we touch has a finite lifespan Indeed. Nothing is permanent. The only constant is change.
- Zetobal 3y agoWe'll just follow dang wherever he goes :P
- theGnuMe 3y agoYC could train a dangGPT to auto-moderate. I don't see HN disappearing. It is niche enough and YC likely uses it.
- WithinReason 3y agoMaybe dang already did that and is now sipping Margaritas on a beach somewhere
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoI can't imagine doing what he does and not needing a margarita or several. I don't know how he survives it.
- krapp 3y agoHe gets a paycheck.
- progne 3y ago"ChatGPT42, generate a working copy of the old Hacker News site for me to read based on today's news and the probable reactions to it. Have it respond to my posts accordingly."
- earthboundkid 3y agoNow, sort by controversial.
- wg0 3y agoNow what's left besides such corners is the "commercial internet" run by A/B testers, KPIs and OKRs. Ironically, that's what Venture Capital is all about. Mostly.
- warrenm 3y agoassume nothing will exist "forever" HN will one day go the way of the dodo bird Whether that is in a month, year, decade, or century is up for realization But like every other website/service in existence ... it will have its time, and it will fade/die eventually
- LinuxBender 3y agoShould we plan for a life after HN? There is no need to wait for such an event. In my opinion what makes this site unique is how it is run rather than the tech. One could make note(s) of how Daniel manages this site and try their hand at mimicking the patterns on existing sites. People could attempt to replicate something close to his methodology, guidelines and levels of engagement on their own self hosted Postmill, Mastodon, Forums, Chat sites, etc... In my opinion there is no harm in having multiple great sites.
- arethuza 3y ago"People could attempt to replicate something close to his methodology, guidelines and levels of engagement" I wonder how close are we to getting an AI to do this kind of work? Pretty far I would guess?
- xena 3y agoManaging a community requires the uncountable efforts of the human soul. As of the current date, large language models do not possess one.
- pjlegato 3y agoThat's rather eloquently romantic, but doesn't actually seem to mean anything beyond "it requires some ineffable quality of vague goodness that just FEELS right to me, I know it when I see it." What can be done besides "emotional feedback subjective gut check on how it makes me feel" when we propose to analyze the scenario?
- closeparen 3y agoBased on the commentariat’s enthusiasm for Section 230 reform then, the community wills its own destruction.
- bookofjoe 3y agoword of the day: commentariat
- Aloha 3y agoLike I'd be happy to contribute financially to a HN elsewhere if the need arose. We'd just have to work out the details, I think the underlying software HN runs on is open source, so it wouldnt be too hard to do as a community project.
- huijzer 3y agoAs long as Y Combinator is doing fine, HN will probably be fine too.
- dcminter 3y agoIt would be very strange (and rather sad) for you to remain the same person exactly and HN to be exactly as it is now in perpetuity. Perhaps the next thing will be better? For me HN > /.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago> Should we plan for this? No. Most things don't end abruptly. There are signs it's ending. People will migrate to something else as they always do.
- swatcoder 3y ago> some sort of mirror platform with the same profiles, same data and as much of the algorithm as possible No offense, but you’ve just distilled the blindspot behind a lot of social startup ideas. Good communities are not a product of technology or data. Technology and data facilitate different cost and scaling opportunities, but are just the bones upon which a community might be built. This community is good because of excellent human involvement through dang (and others at YC) and through the luck of having the right, responsible users around so far. There’s no recreating it. Sometimes, you just have to enjoy things while they exist and then let go of them once they don’t.
- TheCleric 3y agoJust take the login page. It’s obvious that what makes this place special isn’t fancy technology.
- thnswede 3y agoIf HN goes away it's because it's replaced by something else. Something that meets users needs better. What's there to plan for, except if you intend to make that new thing to supplant HN?
- JohnFen 3y ago> If HN goes away it's because it's replaced by something else Why are you so sure of this? The internet is chock full of counterexamples to the idea.
- fragmede 3y ago> If HN goes away it's because it's replaced by something else. Have you tested the site backups? How do you know that dang's backups work? when's the last time they were tested? An act of god could take out the servers that run this place, and their backups, and the site's history and contents would be gone. you'd go to http://news.ycombinator.com http://news.ycombinator.com and get an error page that says "we're having trouble serving your request." Or worse - no response at all. Would the site survive hours or days of downtime? would we come flooding back to an empty site and just start filling it back up again after our threads, our /comments, out /favorites, our /highlights were lost? It would be like a death in the family. We might take off, never to come back instead. This is not to impugn dang's computer skills. I'm sure there's a good plan in place. But you might want your open copy of the pages you want to keep.
- rob 3y agoI think I joined the first month HN was introduced or around there. It really hasn't lost too much of its "feel" to me since then. Seems like it's pretty active with no plans to change, but who knows?
- 6510 3y agoFor HN we should have a full blown desktop client and server tools for the p2p distribution of the archives. Then build the stuff to resurrect the front page and recent posts when they become unavailable. Eventually the hn server does nothing but sign postings and count scores. Users who've accumulated to many points can sign their postings themselves until such privilege is revoked.
- DustinBrett 3y agoNecessity is the mother of invention.
- xena 3y agoTechnology does not create or kill communities, the people do. If you replace dang, you have a different website than hacker news.
- swyx 3y ago> I understand that a huge part of why HN works is dang. I'm unsure how we mirror him though. dang possibly has the most prolific and easily accessible structured data on his moderation decisions and replies we can have for modeling the domain specific behavior of a single person... surely we can train classifiers and language models for him
- Havoc 3y agoI suspect that enough of the y combinator crowd gets enough value out of it (and y combinator itself) that it is in no immediate danger - either financially or from yc deciding to shut it down Besides - it runs on a single box last I checked
- Kapura 3y agoChange is inevitable, and going to extreme lengths to preserve the current status quo is almost never worth it. Consider the recent death of Twitter, which seemed so real that tweets were being routinely embedded in news articles. I personally spent a lot of time there, but when it became unusable for me I moved on, to discord communities and bluesky. These are not the same, they are not a twitter-replacement per se, but they fill similar niches in my life. This process is normal, and has existed for all of human history. People are adaptable.
- pjlegato 3y agoTwitter is not dead; it rather caters to a different and broader audience segment now. What happened is that it is no longer an institutionally governed "safe space" where only leftist progressive views are allowed to be voiced in public, and any dissenting views were censored. The segment of people who think that applying that sort of leftist ideological purity filter on all public discourse is a good thing are leaving, while another (and ultimately much larger) segment of the public who highly value free speech are joining.
- Kapura 3y agoI don't want to hear your ideology of how newly empowered bigots harassing folks off the platform is good, actually. Twitter used to be good and useful; removing actual verification, and then tweetdeck, and now you can't view threads without logging in, these things have made the site worse.
- pjlegato 3y agoMerely disagreeing with liberal or progressive viewpoints does not, in itself, render someone "a bigot."
- seydor 3y agoLemmy already exists
- hluska 3y agoI’m old so I have seen many communities come and go. Usenet went from being the go to source for documentation and troubleshooting to a front end for IRC groups. Those IRC groups were great but then died all of a sudden. It’s even happened with personal communities. For four straight years, my friends and I primarily stayed in contact and shared pictures of our latest adventures on Livejournal. Or hell, I had an entire long term relationship that largely happened because of Twitter. As those services disappeared, I changed too. Sometimes I found replacements and other times, I found that I don’t need those particular dopamine hits. But the one thing I do know is that whenever someone started planning a replacement, the world went off in a different direction. My LJ usage was a great example - there were a lot of conversations about replacing it with something else but none of those conversations predicted that an identity required platform like Facebook would replace it. We actually thought that it would be replaced by something even better for privacy. Whoops!!
- tomcam 3y agoIf dang broke off and started a for-pay site he’d get rich. The numbers are sort of unavoidable. If a million people subscribe to HN and only 1% stayed with him to pay $5/month for the ad-free version to start, it pencils out nicely. He could easily afford an apprentice, though finding a good one would be tough. I would love to see that happen be dug before the burnout kills him or drives him batty.
- OnionBlender 3y agoIf HN died then maybe lobste.rs would become more popular. I think Lobsters does some things better (tags you can filter) but posts currently get very few comments. However, the invitation requirement might be too much of a barrier for many people.
- AnonC 3y agoJust let it go, but keep the memories (perhaps save some interesting content somewhere). Every user generated content platform has a finite life and lives with no way to replicate it as-is elsewhere. People have attempted to replicate many communities with varying degrees of success, but it’s just not the same (that doesn’t mean it’s always worse when replicated…it’s just not the same anymore). One of the hardest but useful lessons in life is to move on (and figuring out when and how to move on).
- btilly 3y agoI have been part of many online communities. To name a few, the old Usenet, Slashdot, IWETHEY, Perlmonks, and HN. I long ago accepted that all die at some point. And something new will be created. The new will never be the same as the old. But the fundamental problems are social, not technical. Your mirror platform is an idea that I've seen tried multiple times, and I've only seen work once. That was when the InfoWorld Electric forums broke, and the core participants moved to IWETHEY as a replacement. But, generally, the technology isn't what breaks, it is the social dynamics. Usenet, Slashdot and Perlmonks are still out there. They just don't have the same social dynamics that they used to. People enter, others leave, and the community changes. Those who are motivated may agree to meet over there when this goes. But they are always more motivated to be here here now. People who leave here, don't go there because there is nobody there to attract them. And they don't want to form a community over there for a future mass migration because they (probably accurately) project that the people they don't like here will just be part of that migration. I'll cry a tear if HN falls apart to the point I don't want to be here. But I'll also accept it as just how online communities work. Maybe I'll see people I know in my next community. Maybe not. I'll keep a few personal friends, and I'll move on. This is just how things work online. And there is no technological solution for what is fundamentally a social problem.
- BatFastard 3y agoIn the mid 90s slashdot was the hot place. Just because most people had no idea how to get to a place called slash dot dot com! Lasted for a few years. I agree it is community that makes a space. And HN has been holding on to their for quite a while now.
- krapp 3y agoNo. Hacker News is a distraction, nothing more. It shouldn't define your life or identity to the point that you need to plan for its absence like the death of a parent or sibling. Go touch grass, nerds.
- jonathaneunice 3y agoBeyond a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), let's demand a full Information Lifecycle Management Plan (ILMP) addressing: * Records Retention * Archival Strategy * Digital Preservation and Perpetual Retention, and * Succession Planning for Information Assets.
- samsquire 3y agoI'm really grateful for HN as a source of tech news and hard fought for knowledge in the technical world. I remember digg, StumbleUpon and Slashdot. Thank you all and thank you dang. I also recently joined Lobsters which is also another on my reading schedule.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoDon't worry I could build Hacker News in a weekend.