Feels like a great case study in confirmation bias: you only looked at the topics that ended up being successful. How many tech trends did Hacker News hype up only to have them go nowhere? Without that info we don’t really know what HN’s success rate is.
That was my first instinct but I'm not sure it's actually true.
If my priority is to know about interesting topics so I can be informed on them when they take off then this is the right methodology. HN might be a bit inefficient in time, but this suggests that new tech trends will generally not arrive without having had some advance warning on HN. This is what I need - as a consultant it's useful to know what the client is talking about when they bring up something cutting-edge, and useful to know about cutting edge things to recommend as relevant.
> How many tech trends did Hacker News hype up only to have them go nowhere?
Do all of these graphs taken into account actual "hype" or just the existence, and number, of posts on hacker news? I would like to see the graphs adjusted for discussion. Take number of comments into account, analysis of sentiment in the discussion, etc. Are they actually being hyped?
For instance, the description above the Bitcoin graph gives a link to the very first mention of Bitcoin[1] but the link goes to a post with no comments.
I guess number of posts and timeline of posts could indicate trend but should we call it "hyping" those trends? I would imagine that would come from the averaged response sentiment of the discussion on those posts.
Exactly. Or at last a comparative analysis with similar news feeds. Would reddit tech posts not yield similar results? If not then perhaps one has an edge in term of early discovery future trends.
The variety of tech subjects submitted by hacker newsers is very large, and mostly about the most innovative and financially rewarding domain: tech.
So sure, hacker news does predict every upcoming trend since someone will be posting something about each and every plausibly promising thing.
HN talks about Bitcoin/crypto frequently, but the overwhelming opinion for years has been that it's pointless.
That will certainly be a huge miss, similar to the dismissal of easy file syncing. DeFi/crypto/NFTs seem to be gaining real traction and HN hasn't accepted it.
Not only confirmation bias, but also they're essentially polling a very specific subset of the population.
This is a segment of the population that would be replete with model train enthusiasts, RC plane hobbyists, and HAM radio operators back in the day. So, yeah, things of interest in the tech space would be of even more interest to people on HN.
But yeah, they also picked the "winners", they really have to filter for all topics discussed by HN and then find out how many of those became "future tech" and how many fell by the wayside. Because if it's 1 in 100, it's not a really good predictor.
And if something becomes mainstream, then of course it'll be talked about. That's kind of how it works.
Understanding what will go nowhere would be so much more useful! Following trends can be valuable, but old ways still work. Chasing wild geese is catastrophic.
This! Since people have limited time, if HN leads more more often then not on some tech goose chase, then it doesn't matter if some tech trend is mentioned early on HN and has interest.
But ultimately what makes something successful is investment in that thing in both time and money. HN is very VC heavy tech crowd and of course it should lead in trends where VC tech crowd creates out of pure effort and money.
Telsa and 3D printing is an interesting example. If it isn't strictly a digital good, HN might not be ahead given the audience.
