[jaredklewis]

I kind of see what you are saying, but it reminds me of “if you build it, they will come.”

They won’t come, because they won’t even know about it. A more accurate aphorism would have been “if you build it and tell everyone about it, some of them might come.”

Humans probably don’t want the site to succeed, because they mostly don’t know it exists.

[watwut]

It is different. If you SEO, you are actively changing content toward worst and less interesting. That is not the same as making the decision between market and not-market.

[ssl-3]

Perhaps.

How much SEO happens here on HN? How much do they spend to tell everyone about it? I'm guessing: Not much; maybe zero.

But people come here, anyway.

(That doesn't mean that it's capable of independently sustaining itself, but people do show up.)

[AlecSchueler]

> How much do they spend to tell everyone about it?

You could see every YCombinator investment as a kind of sidelong marketing for HN.

[TeMPOraL]

If you build it, and it's genuinely, uniquely useful, you won't be able to stop people from coming and inviting others to join.

Telling everyone about it is only necessary if you're indistinguishable from 100 different takes on the same thing, and trying to win a shouting match (this includes hurrying to shout the world down before competitors get a chance).

But as the saying goes, you are not in traffic - you are the traffic. The reason you need to shout is because of people like you shouting.