[Minor49er]

> That's a big part of the appeal of places like Hacker News and Tumblr- the focus on being a social network without adding in additional ad-delivery "features."

I myself wouldn't count Hacker News as a social network. There isn't anything that caters towards individuals making connections with one another. It's all about short-lasting exchanges between strangers on a given topic. The social aspect is fleeting and the network part is nonexistent (at least among users themselves. Networking has to happen through a third party). Not saying that this is a bad thing at all because HN is certainly a fun and appealing place to hang out online.

To the article itself, I think the author's graph is a little too simplistic. It only trends downwards. Some baseline features can cater to a more engaging discourse. The reason I say this is because I've been using an experimental social network called Minus (https://minus.social/#) which is very basic: you can't "friend" or "follow" anyone, there are no clubs or groups or private messages (though you can @mention), the main timeline combines everyone's activity, and you only have 100 posts available until you can't post anymore (but you have unlimited replies to other peoples' posts). While fun, it's hard to keep track of people unless you get into a conversation with them or unless they post frequently (though they can get buried by speedrunners who try to exhaust their post counts as fast as possible if you don't block them). So with Minus, I think there is still potential to add features that would positively contribute to the level of discourse before it would experience a downward trend