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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Something that meets users needs better.
What's there to plan for, except if you intend to make that new thing to supplant HN?
No. Most things don't end abruptly. There are signs it's ending. People will migrate to something else as they always do.
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!!
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
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.
One of the hardest but useful lessons in life is to move on (and figuring out when and how to move on).
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.
* Records Retention * Archival Strategy * Digital Preservation and Perpetual Retention, and * Succession Planning for Information Assets.
Thank you all and thank you dang.
I also recently joined Lobsters which is also another on my reading schedule.
Besides - it runs on a single box last I checked
Ironically, that's what Venture Capital is all about. Mostly.