Ask HN: Should we plan for a life after HN?

&gt; some sort of mirror platform with the same profiles, same data and as much of the algorithm as possible<p>No offense, but you’ve just distilled the blindspot behind a lot of social startup ideas. Good communities are not a product of technology or data.<p>Technology and data facilitate different cost and scaling opportunities, but are just the bones upon which a community might be built.<p>This community is good because of <i>excellent</i> human involvement through dang (and others at YC) and through the luck of having the right, responsible users around so far. There’s no recreating it.<p>Sometimes, you just have to enjoy things while they exist and then let go of them once they don’t.

<i>Should we plan for a life after HN?</i><p>There is no need to wait for such an event. In my opinion what makes this site unique is how it is run rather than the tech. One could make note(s) of how Daniel manages this site and try their hand at mimicking the patterns on existing sites. People could attempt to replicate something close to his methodology, guidelines and levels of engagement on their own self hosted Postmill, Mastodon, Forums, Chat sites, etc... In my opinion there is no harm in having multiple great sites.

I worry about this myself. I feel like HN is the last refuge of what the old Internet was supposed to be like.<p>I&#x27;m not sure it can be replicated. The future of the Internet seems to me to be small private &quot;hidden&quot; communities and mega platforms filled with garbage. No room for a middle<p>Maybe a paid platform?

&quot;ChatGPT42, generate a working copy of the old Hacker News site for me to read based on today&#x27;s news and the probable reactions to it. Have it respond to my posts accordingly.&quot;

&gt; it made me realise that HN, like any other online forum, has a finite lifespan<p>Everything we touch has a finite lifespan, and I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the important thing to think about.<p>I would further comment, but the guidelines[0] last point says not to.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

assume nothing will exist &quot;forever&quot;<p>HN will one day go the way of the dodo bird<p>Whether that is in a month, year, decade, or century is up for realization<p>But like every other website&#x2F;service in existence ... it will have its time, and it will fade&#x2F;die eventually

We&#x27;ll just follow dang wherever he goes :P

I have been part of many online communities. To name a few, the old Usenet, Slashdot, IWETHEY, Perlmonks, and HN.<p>I long ago accepted that all die at some point. And something new will be created. The new will never be the same as the old. But the fundamental problems are social, not technical.<p>Your mirror platform is an idea that I&#x27;ve seen tried multiple times, and I&#x27;ve only seen work once. That was when the InfoWorld Electric forums broke, and the core participants moved to IWETHEY as a replacement.<p>But, generally, the technology isn&#x27;t what breaks, it is the social dynamics. Usenet, Slashdot and Perlmonks are still out there. They just don&#x27;t have the same social dynamics that they used to. People enter, others leave, and the community changes. Those who are motivated may agree to meet over there when this goes. But they are always more motivated to be here here now. People who leave here, don&#x27;t go there because there is nobody there to attract them. And they don&#x27;t want to form a community over there for a future mass migration because they (probably accurately) project that the people they don&#x27;t like here will just be part of that migration.<p>I&#x27;ll cry a tear if HN falls apart to the point I don&#x27;t want to be here. But I&#x27;ll also accept it as just how online communities work. Maybe I&#x27;ll see people I know in my next community. Maybe not. I&#x27;ll keep a few personal friends, and I&#x27;ll move on.<p>This is just how things work online. And there is no technological solution for what is fundamentally a social problem.

If HN goes away it&#x27;s because it&#x27;s replaced by something else.<p>Something that meets users needs better.<p>What&#x27;s there to plan for, except if you intend to make that new thing to supplant HN?

&gt; Should we plan for this?<p>No. Most things don&#x27;t end abruptly. There are signs it&#x27;s ending. People will migrate to something else as they always do.

I’m old so I have seen many communities come and go. Usenet went from being the go to source for documentation and troubleshooting to a front end for IRC groups. Those IRC groups were great but then died all of a sudden.<p>It’s even happened with personal communities. For four straight years, my friends and I primarily stayed in contact and shared pictures of our latest adventures on Livejournal. Or hell, I had an entire long term relationship that largely happened because of Twitter.<p>As those services disappeared, I changed too. Sometimes I found replacements and other times, I found that I don’t need those particular dopamine hits.<p>But the one thing I do know is that whenever someone started planning a replacement, the world went off in a different direction. My LJ usage was a great example - there were a lot of conversations about replacing it with something else but none of those conversations predicted that an identity required platform like Facebook would replace it. We actually thought that it would be replaced by something even better for privacy. Whoops!!

&gt; I understand that a huge part of why HN works is dang. I&#x27;m unsure how we mirror him though.<p>dang possibly has the most prolific and easily accessible structured data on his moderation decisions and replies we can have for modeling the domain specific behavior of a single person... surely we can train classifiers and language models for him

Like I&#x27;d be happy to contribute financially to a HN elsewhere if the need arose.<p>We&#x27;d just have to work out the details, I think the underlying software HN runs on is open source, so it wouldnt be too hard to do as a community project.

I think I joined the first month HN was introduced or around there. It really hasn&#x27;t lost too much of its &quot;feel&quot; to me since then. Seems like it&#x27;s pretty active with no plans to change, but who knows?

Change is inevitable, and going to extreme lengths to preserve the current status quo is almost never worth it. Consider the recent death of Twitter, which seemed so real that tweets were being routinely embedded in news articles. I personally spent a lot of time there, but when it became unusable for me I moved on, to discord communities and bluesky. These are not the same, they are not a twitter-replacement per se, but they fill similar niches in my life. This process is normal, and has existed for all of human history. People are adaptable.

As long as Y Combinator is doing fine, HN will probably be fine too.

Just let it go, but keep the memories (perhaps save some interesting content somewhere). Every user generated content platform has a finite life and lives with no way to replicate it as-is elsewhere. People have attempted to replicate many communities with varying degrees of success, but it’s just not the same (that doesn’t mean it’s always worse when replicated…it’s just not the same anymore).<p>One of the hardest but useful lessons in life is to move on (and figuring out when and how to move on).

For HN we should have a full blown desktop client and server tools for the p2p distribution of the archives. Then build the stuff to resurrect the front page and recent posts when they become unavailable. Eventually the hn server does nothing but sign postings and count scores. Users who&#x27;ve accumulated to many points can sign their postings themselves until such privilege is revoked.

If dang broke off and started a for-pay site he’d get rich. The numbers are sort of unavoidable. If a million people subscribe to HN and only 1% stayed with him to pay $5&#x2F;month for the ad-free version to start, it pencils out nicely.<p>He could easily afford an apprentice, though finding a good one would be tough.<p>I would love to see that happen be dug before the burnout kills him or drives him batty.

Beyond a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), let&#x27;s demand a full Information Lifecycle Management Plan (ILMP) addressing:<p>* Records Retention * Archival Strategy * Digital Preservation and Perpetual Retention, and * Succession Planning for Information Assets.

I&#x27;m really grateful for HN as a source of tech news and hard fought for knowledge in the technical world. I remember digg, StumbleUpon and Slashdot.<p>Thank you all and thank you dang.<p>I also recently joined Lobsters which is also another on my reading schedule.

I suspect that enough of the y combinator crowd gets enough value out of it (and y combinator itself) that it is in no immediate danger - either financially or from yc deciding to shut it down<p>Besides - it runs on a single box last I checked

It would be very strange (and rather sad) for you to remain the same person exactly and HN to be exactly as it is now in perpetuity. Perhaps the next thing will be better? For me HN &gt; &#x2F;.

Now what&#x27;s left besides such corners is the &quot;commercial internet&quot; run by A&#x2F;B testers, KPIs and OKRs.<p>Ironically, that&#x27;s what Venture Capital is all about. Mostly.

Technology does not create or kill communities, the people do. If you replace dang, you have a different website than hacker news.

Don&#x27;t worry I could build Hacker News in a weekend.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Lemmy already exists

If HN died then maybe lobste.rs would become more popular. I think Lobsters does some things better (tags you can filter) but posts currently get very few comments. However, the invitation requirement might be too much of a barrier for many people.

No. Hacker News is a distraction, nothing more. It shouldn&#x27;t define your life or identity to the point that you need to plan for its absence like the death of a parent or sibling. Go touch grass, nerds.