[probdist]

Hacker News has incredibly good long term retention of active users (commenters/submitters). I just published a blog post on the subject (https://probdist.com/2020/03/28/the-graying-of-hacker-news-u...).

Lots of users on HN are actively contributing for years after sign up. This to me is a good sign of health. The counter point is of course, the rapid drop off in engagement after the initial month. Where a large number of users each month never return to the site.

The average comment on Hacker News last month was written by a user with 5 years of tenure on the site. Depending on your perspective you could argue this is a good or a bad thing (new users aren't contributing as much as old users, or old users are continuing to contribute!).