reddit apparently did a billion pageviews last month. I'd rather HN not turn into reddit.

While there are still some intellectual safe havens on reddit, the majority of the site is now dick jokes and pun threads. Not that reddit doesn't still contribute informative comments, just that the signal-to-noise ratio has definitely shifted over the years.

HN, by contrast, tends to be intellectual by default, with the odd tasteful joke or pun thrown in for good measure where appropriate.

I really like this place, and I'd hate for it to become ruined by an excess of new users.

(and yes, I know you were just making a TSN joke)

i was actually just curious as to why a million pageviews wouldn't be worthy of congratulations :)

though, now that we've shifted, i agree with you- but also have hope that pageviews are not the deciding factor of community downfall!

I don't really see a way that pageviews could significantly increase without a corresponding increase in uniques. The most obvious reason to see an increase in uniques is to have an increase in new users.

Onboarding new users into the HN culture is relatively easy when you're dealing with a steady but slow intake. I'll admit that I can be an ass on reddit and my highest karma posts have mostly been stupid jokes, but I take things serious on HN because HN presents itself as a serious place.

When you get a significant stream of new users, it can be harder to keep them all in line. If you get a bunch of new folks together voting up their own brand of inane crap, it'll start to pollute the front page. A polluted front page sets a bad tone for newer users, because they think that sort of thing is tolerated.

HN has systems in place to stop this of course, like the ability of some users to kill a post outright and the karmic threshold for downvoting, but there will likely come a time when that isn't enough anymore.

I agree that pageviews are generally a good thing, but HN isn't advertising-funded in the traditional sense (by that I only mean that HN does serve as an advertising platform for YC companies to an extent) so having high pageviews probably isn't high on PG's goals list. HN is pretty unique in that respect, and that's a distinct part of its charm.

A million page views isn't cool. You know what's cool? New material ;-)

Movie quotes have replaced puns as the lowest form of wit. Yes, we get it. You're quoting a movie. Congratulations.