Hacker News is an awesome site specifically with the programmer in mind. Despite the usage of the site growing over recent times, it’s yet to break into the mainstream like Digg or Reddit which allows it to continue to function as quite a tight knit community. It also ensures there’s a high level of quality when it comes to the articles being promoted, which is always good to see. The team at HN purposely want the community to stay as it is, eventually it will grow, and go past a point of no return – here’s a list of ways that could happen:

1) The UI and Usability is spiced up

HN has a very simple approach to UI, keeps it clean and functional, however it’s a pretty bland website to the uninitiated. Usability is also a bit of an issue… Whilst the vote up and down functionality is plain to see and use, options within the profile settings page for example leave you mostly clueless.

Options like noprocrast, maxvisit, minaway and delay all leave you pretty dumbfounded as to what they do. A look at the FAQ gives you more info, but it’s not very intuitive.

Regardless, this is likely done on purpose. It’s almost meant to be unfriendly in it’s approach to ensure the site only keeps the right kind of people sticking around. I’m pretty sure it’s working well for them, so crack on boys!

2) They Develop HN Vote Buttons

Another way that’ll kick HN from background to foreground is if they implement voting buttons for websites. This will not only encourage more publishers to come here to post their links, but also pimp the HN name out there where it normally wouldn’t be seen. Admittedly, as a publisher of content I would love to have an HN voting button within my articles, but when I think of the possible impact of having that on the HN community, it leaves a bit of a sour taste in the mouth.

3) Users start up-voting images of a dog eating a RAM stick

This is definitely the sure sign you’ll need to find out that HN is about to go from tight knit community, to large scale monster. I don’t think I need to explain why I have mentioned this, suffice to say, the quality expectations of the users has dropped signficantly, leading to more of the same old rubbish. Welcome Digg2.

4) Gaming the site

Another sign that HN is about to break is when it becomes spoken about as a viable alternative to site like Reddit etc, and people start to game the algorithm. This will likely be more of an underground movement rather than obvious, but you can bet your bottom dollar that as soon as people realise HN could or can be exploited, and its worth exploiting, they will.

Thankfully, I don’t think we really see many situations where gaming the site to get on the homepage happens right now. HN already have various measures in place which blocks out suspicious activity, and rightly so.

5) Snorg Tee Ads appear

And finally, you know when it’s truly game over when the ads appear on the site. That’s when you know the numbers have got to such a point where you just cannot argue against monetizing the content that you provide. I’d hate to have to have that internal battle in my head (unless I was already minted and I could afford to provide it as a service for free).

Let’s hope these are all very far off in the future… if ever

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 and is filed under Social-Web, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.