What is causing the major growth in new HN users?

Question

This was brought up by someone some months back [1] and was judged by dang to be a spike due to YC applicants. Assuming, the the data here [2] is accurate, what is the explanation for new user growth and are the new users causing any issues?[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35009073[2] https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/user-analysis

codingdave · Accepted Answer

I don't know where it is coming from, but it seems correlated to the chart on the 'Overview' page titled: "How many text stories created per month?"
I have definitely noticed a large influx of posts which are basically blog posts posted to HN. No questions, no links, nothing shared, just... someone posting a few paragraphs of their own thoughts. So while I've been around long enough to know that eventually the community tends to settle into its own norms... things have felt different recently.
None of this answers your question, so this was a lot of words to say, "I don't know, but am interested in the answer."

jruohonen · Answer

Some speculations: one of the few places left with mostly civil discussion, no algorithms, plain text, no unnecessary user interface distractions, etc.

june_twenty · Answer

Reddit's drive for engagement has probably driven a certain segment of its userbase away

ggm · Answer

Leakage into other fora, and time: anything which lasts gets known.There's a lot of retro going on atm: typewriter collecting, pinball, what's old is new and HN is quite old school.

hayst4ck · Answer

Reddit's crapification was definitely my first instinct, but I think it might be the ChatGPT buzz.That's assuming the users are legitimate, it's possible they are not legitimate. The idea that state actors are leveraging technology to manipulate online discourse is definitely worth falsifying.

anbeliever · Answer

Too many startups doing developer tools? And HN is the best place to each to the developers? GitHub could become a good developer focused social network, until then HN is the best:)

ano88888 · Answer

LLM bots?

What is causing the major growth in new HN users?

Some speculations: one of the few places left with mostly civil discussion, no algorithms, plain text, no unnecessary user interface distractions, etc.

Reddit's drive for engagement has probably driven a certain segment of its userbase away

Leakage into other fora, and time: anything which lasts gets known.
There's a lot of retro going on atm: typewriter collecting, pinball, what's old is new and HN is quite old school.

Reddit's crapification was definitely my first instinct, but I think it might be the ChatGPT buzz.
That's assuming the users are legitimate, it's possible they are not legitimate. The idea that state actors are leveraging technology to manipulate online discourse is definitely worth falsifying.

Too many startups doing developer tools? And HN is the best place to each to the developers? GitHub could become a good developer focused social network, until then HN is the best:)

LLM bots?