[germinator]

The "users ceasing to post stories after one year" metric seems a bit wonky to me. I mean, I don't doubt it, but it's probably skewed by accounts created for self-promotion or spam. If you look at front-page stories, I think that most of them are from long-time members.

It would probably be useful to separate the churn of throwaway accounts and the ones that cross some engagement threshold - 50 comments or something like that.

[zamadatix]

Better yet just a graph of the ratio of comments vs posts over time.

[osm3000]

That is an interesting point! It makes sense to have a criteria that identify real users / long-term members.

I will look into that. Cheers

[Brajeshwar]

We humans are emotional. Users' submissions didn't get the desired reach, and comments were thrashed to oblivion- they got emotional and left/lurked without participating anymore. Besides the usual promotional accounts that crop up, this is one of the reasons people do not participate.

Leave the emotion out of the equation, and HackerNews becomes way calmer for you.

The same story you submitted that failed gets talked about/discussed when submitted by another -- eh! All the smart people shred your comment -- ah, let's take a walk.