Comment by jeswin
3 years ago
36-45 is just as big as the 26-35 group, I must say I'm surpised!
I'm close to 42 and I've been here for 15 years now (as a reader more than as a contributor); when I joined I certainly didn't expect to be here for that long. Testament to the quality of discussion, although it has gotten a bit partisan of late. I was on Slashdot prior to that for about 10 years. What was most appealing about HN was the information density, and the discouragement of jokes. I guess if you distil a UI down to the basics (HN just being pure text) there is a certain timelessness to it. Slashdot soon felt bloated and stuffy and I never went back.
Having said that, the fact that the 16-20 and 21-25 is so under-represented doesn't bode well for the future of the website.
Edit: I think 36-45 was the largest group when I started writing the comment. It isn't now.
The HN demographics distribution is starting to skew older over time, compared to this older poll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536734
Reddit stats are had to come by, but I wonder if the users who use it for mostly news and text rather than interesting images/videos/memes (would old.reddit.com users be a good proxy?) has aged the same way.
I think "faster" and "flashier" content wins out in social media, so for example the text interaction people have left for twitter and Substack. Heck, compare pg's amount of public comments here vs all his content on Twitter, sama when he was still with YC, the other YC people, etc. (I mean they probably have alts but still).
I expect that certain ways HN was designed are becoming less attractive as a platform for the population at large, like the 80-character title limit so that it could fit a title in a single terminal line (although I personally love this more than I hate it, keeps things to-the-point).
I wonder what the TikTok version of the HN-type community is like?
It'll be like HN. I don't see where else it can go in terms of media delivery. Nothing seems faster than text to skim through. I could see an ML trained for your specific requirements so only the stories you like surface. I must click on 10% of the headlines and then engage with 10% of those, so that would save time. Then the text/commenting interface would be much the same.
> Having said that, the fact that the 16-20 and 21-25 is so under-represented doesn't bode well for the future of the website.
I don't think it necessarily says all that much; at that age many are probably busy doing a lot of other things: going out, dating, studying, getting your career off the ground, whatnot. Things like children that you may have later in life also take up a lot of time, but the patterns of that are different (e.g. more "quiet evenings" at home).
I'm 40 myself. I also came here from Slahdot. What attracted me to HN was that /. culture at the time (during 2000s) was VERY pro open source. In my youth I was a fierce OS advocate, including founding a LUG and whatnot.
Reading HN comments and stories at that time felt fresh: There were startups making money with software, there was people that valued different things and could have a good discussion. I think it was me naturally maturing from my 'communist' youth to 'capitalist' adulthood.
Funnily as time passes it seems theres more pro-open source feeling in here. Even some of the Destop Linux discussions that happen here remind me of old /. discussions. And it's hilarious that I'm often on the opposite side of the argument from when I blindly defended Linux 20 years ago.
Thats interesting - what do you feel changed in your view of open source?