[rythie]

It's funny, if Hacker News was the product of a startup it would have been redesigned, A/B tested and tons of features/tweaks added. Any growth would be seen as the result of those actions, however HN has grown anyway despite being stagnent for 5+ years.

Makes you wonder what all the software development really achieves, or if HN would be bigger still if they had done that - or if PG wants HN to be bigger at all.

[pasbesoin]

pg puts his time and effort into managing the community, rather than the page controls.

He's repeatedly, periodically made comments on efforts to improve moderation, filtering, ranking, etc. And those efforts are evident in their effect upon content.

"Stagnant" is not an accurate description.

Finally, HN is a tool -- a tool for communication. In that respect, it works pretty well, and is actually somewhat UNIX-y, I'd argue. (E.g. leaving notifications to external add-ons, private communication to email et al., etc. HN focuses on its core purpose of posts, comments, and ranking (public discussion).)

P.S. This is, obviously, just my observation and opinion, FWIW.

P.P.S. Sorry -- rereading the parent comment, I think we are more like-minded than I first thought.

One might say pg has focused on the message, rather than the presentation. Which has worked rather well. Although I think I and some others are also just fine with the presentation -- readability over eye candy, and with the effort put into other aspects of the site.

And... as some have observed, sometimes it is suspected or outright apparent that supposed "limitations" are actually a feature. For example, limiting disruptive, low S/N back-and-forth commenting.

I guess I've written all this in part for the benefit (if any) of some newer members who happen to read this. Experiencing HN over a longer period of time, I've found perhaps (presumptively) somewhat deeper insight into pg's and the moderators' approach and management.

[rythie]

I wasn't implying he had done the wrong thing particularly, graphic redesigns can be expensive and it's not clear how much value they add, he has clearly avoided them.

In my own experience I've found if you don't make at least small changes that people can see, early adopters think no one is working on the product and go away - because they perceive nothing will ever improve. This effect doesn't really apply to community or social networks though for the reasons you said.

[ssebro]

Yip. I wonder if it makes more sense to focus on bd (for hn, this was building the YC brand) once you reach some measure of product market fit... Very interesting observation.

[harold]

How are you measuring growth on HN? Userbase? Pageviews?