Comment by saalweachter
13 days ago
I know everyone here is heckling calling it a forum, but this is a basic forum feedback loop -- the forum activity declines, so people show up to check less often and get fewer responses to their posts, so the post there less often, repeat until traffic falls near zero.
You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage, especially if the cost to continuing to run the forum is trivial, but it's basically a death spiral every time.
> You may have like a handful of weirdos who never leave and develop their own little community in the wreckage
Slashdot is firmly in this stage of its existence, and honestly it's kinda fun
I wonder what stage of the loop HN finds itself in.
So the question for all forums is "what is the user funnel?"
For some there's an obvious thing that brings people in, like if you're a forum tied to a webcomic or game, and the forum will live as long as that property does.
For others -- which I think HN falls into -- it's just word of mouth about a cool place to hang out, so it will die when there's a cooler place to hang out.