Beyond the Front Page: A Personal Guide to Hacker News
A Cure for The Eternal September
In early 1994, a group of frustrated users on Usenet, a precursor to modern forums, inadvertently coined a term: Eternal September.
The problem wasn’t the month of September itself, but the people who arrived with it. In its early days, Usenet had a relatively high barrier to entry, which helped maintain user quality and content standards. But every fall, a new wave of college freshmen would flood Usenet through their campus networks, posting haphazardly and ignoring established community norms, much to the annoyance of veteran users. Over the years, this September influx became a familiar, if unwelcome, ritual.
1994 was different. Starting the previous year, many consumer internet service providers began offering Usenet access. Suddenly, low-quality, off-topic posts from inexperienced users poured in year-round. The chaos of September had become eternal.
The phrase marks the end of the internet’s early-elite era and crystallizes a chronic dilemma for any online community: scale, topical breadth, and discussion quality form an unstable triad. The intersection of all three is, most days, a fantasy.
And yet one community has, across more than eighteen years, grown relentlessly in users and traffic while sustaining both interesting topics and a high bar of discussion: Hacker News (HN).
The frontpage of HN
Built on a Wall of Text
HN looks plain at first glance. It’s essentially a wall of text, where even most buttons are just text links. Newcomers might not even figure out how to post here. Unlike typical online forums, the vast majority of “posts” on HN are simply shared links. The contribution of the original poster (OP), if any, is limited to a title and perhaps a brief comment, with the ensuing discussion centered on the linked content.
... continue reading