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> "Probably because we restrict their crawlers. But this is an excellent side effect, because the last thing I want is traffic from Google searches." Am I the
by 6cxs2hd6 13y ago
> "Probably because we restrict their crawlers. But this is an excellent side effect, because the last thing I want is traffic from Google searches."
Am I the only one who finds that puzzling?
This isn't Fight Club. It's not even Entrepreneur Club. It's a bunch of generally smart people talking about technology, with an emphasis on making money from it. It's one of my favorite sites, and I love it, but it's not an invitation-only club, is it?
(I also find it weird that one of the go-to sites for web-savvy people would be like, "yeah, screw status codes and how the open, linked, web is supposed to work".)
To be clear, I'm not Protesting a Great Evil. I just find it puzzling, as in, "That's odd, I must not understand what this is all about, after all."
- Crito 13y agoI can't speak for PG, but I think the general idea is that a slow influx of new users is less likely to alter the nature of HN as everyone has a chance to acclimatize (avoiding some sort of Eternal September), and the people who really "need" to be on HN (people interested in startups I guess?) will know about HN already, or be told about it. That last part might be a little "fightclub-ish" I guess, but it seems to be working alright.
- buttsex 13y agoCouldn't he just turn off registrations for new accounts? Not saying he needs to get HN to the top for a "startup" search query. I found HN by a Google search while looking for a good laptop to run Linux on.
- supergauntlet 13y agoThat happens. When too many people register accounts they're locked for the rest of the day and the register account option is no longer there, only login.
- Crito 13y agoIIRC sometimes the "Create Account" section of the login page is missing, but can still be accessed through https://new.ycombinator.com/submit https://new.ycombinator.com/submit That's not how it is right now so I'm not sure if I am remembering it correctly.
- kgermino 13y agoIIRC (I might search for it later) that was a spambot fix. Apparently it was fairly effective - I presume the bots were smart enough to find the 'login' link on the front page then register an account from there but not much else.
- milkshakes 13y agomaybe this will help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- timcederman 13y agoIt's also because it saves a ton of resources not having to serve crawler requests.
- phillmv 13y agoIt's not just puzzling, it's almost criminal considering how much of the culture and important decisions get discussed here. A lot of the time you have people who are direct parties to <insert thing here> come and talk about it only for it to become forever inaccessible because Google can't get it's mittens on it. Let's not even get started on how some urls expire.