Reflections: Hacker News 10,000

A little over five years ago (1878 days ago, to be exact) I joined an online community called Hacker News. I don't remember how I heard about it, but I liked what I saw. The design was uncluttered, and the discussion was oriented toward programming, entrepreneurship, and other interesting topics which had a geeky/intellectual bent. From the Wayback Machine, You can see what it looked like in November 2007, which was shortly after I joined.

Importantly, the discussions themselves could be even more interesting than the links. There was a much higher signal/noise ratio in the Hacker News comments than in Slashdot, which until 2007 had been my daily forum of choice. Hacker News members tended to write "long", and even the short comments/questions tended to be thoughtful -- there was almost no trolling, flame wars, or crass one-liners that dominated Digg or Reddit. I have some discovered some standout contributors with strong expertise in startups, programming, and even the law. They include nirvana and grellas.

The quality of the discussion was so good, sometimes I found myself sharing the links to the Hacker News thread, or even writing about them on Computerworld and The Industry Standard, where I worked in the late 2000s.

I began to submit blog posts and articles from my places of work. The very first submission: Computerworld's DOS lives ... Secrets of the Windows command prompt. At IDG (the publisher of Computerworld and The Industry Standard) we were very familiar with the Slashot effect. I quickly discovered that Hacker News did not have the audience of Slashdot, but sometimes there would be a few hundred visitors and some good comments (usually left on Hacker News, not the post/article).

Over time I began to diversify my submissions. By 2009/2010, I was submitting only those articles that A) reflected the news/discussions sources I read most often and B) would be interesting to the Hacker News audience. I submitted 1306 articles and posts in all. Almost all submissions died on the vine, but some resonated. A few received hundreds of upvotes and scores of comments.

For instance, last week I spotted an interesting item in the Chronicle of Higher Education e-newsletter about Salman Khan, the entrepreneur behind Khan Academy. The Hacker News community holds Khan in high regard, partially because of his background (MIT, strong in math and science), but mostly because he has disrupted online learning. I submitted the latest news about Khan's new proposal for higher education, and it received more than 200 upvotes and about 90 comments. It was this submission that pushed me over 10,000 upvotes/points/karma/whatever it's called.

I left very few comments on Hacker News in the beginning. I felt that I didn't have the deep expertise to contribute to most discussions ... and didn't have the time to participate. The exceptions were discussions about online media and some historical topics, or those topics which allowed me to do a little research to add a fact or pose a relevant question. Over five years, I estimate I have made between 100 and 200 comments. Most have only an upvote or two. You can read them here.

There have been other interactions with Hacker News and Y Combinator. A few times I have reached out to other commenters for various reasons -- to use as story sources, or, when I started my first company, I wanted to learn from others in that space. Sometimes, people have contacted me (I leave my Twitter/email information in my profile).

There was another interaction that is worth mentioning. In 2008, I reached out to Paul, who put me in touch with Jessica. By this time, I was familiar with his essays (and Jessica's great interviews in Founders At Work). I was working for The Industry Standard, and wanted to see the Y Combinator accelerator in action. They invited me to their summer headquarters in Cambridge. This was the last year they came to Cambridge. It was great. Jessica was very helpful -- the idea was to make the introductions to the startups, and get out of the way. The space was small (I think there were only a dozen or so teams) but that was alright -- there was a very family-like feeling to the cohort, and I had some great interviews with the founders. Afterwards, a guest speaker came and talked about his observations. I am going to keep my word to Paul and not reveal the identity of the speaker or what the guest speaker talked about.

My final observations concern how Hacker News has changed since 2007.

Certainly, more people are using it, and the front page threads are a lot longer. In the past, there have been discussions about how HN is becoming more like Reddit or the discussion is becoming ruder or more critical. I agree.

Nevertheless, I think the front-page links are great, and the discussions they spawn are almost always thought-provoking. I learn something new every day, and try to make positive contributions from time to time.

Here's to five more years and 10,000 more points ...