[boxy310]

Over time the attrition rate for attention increases. As a result it becomes harder to justify further investments in usability features or content quality because you can no longer leverage the increased attention of more users in the future. This can lead towards a death spiral of lower frequency updates leading to less viewers leading to less updates.

For a venture-backed site even hitting a 20% growth rate per month would be a warning that you're not growing fast enough to justify continued investment, as was the case for a recent postmortem on Gumroad [1].

Given that this post was from 10 years ago that's definitely not the case for Hacker News, but in this climate it's gotten even more extreme if you're relying on venture backing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733

[pier25]

I'm not much of a money guy to be honest but isn't profit what dictates how much you can invest on the product?

If you have a constant user base that provides constant profit why is growth needed to sustain a business?

[nf05papsjfVbc]

It's not needed to sustain the business but it is needed for those who invested in it and would like to cash out on a higher valuation - which typically is achieved through growth.

[pvorb]

But often useful products are shut down because they are not growing fast enough instead of simply letting it run without investing much into it.

[fourthark]

The key words here are "venture-backed".