Eh, don't lionize HN too much; it's not the intellectual bastion folks sometimes pretend, it's just the advertising arm of YCombinator (though dang will disagree with that if you ask him).
I mean, HN isn’t really relevant as an asset to ycombinator besides a advertising asset, right? It has a couple million monthly users, maybe 1 new feature a year, and runs on a single core. It’s more of a demonstration of Arc than anything, right?
Come on. HN gives YCombinator some measure of "street cred" in the tech community, it gives visibility to startups (especially YC's.) It's the water cooler where people gather trying to appear innovative and thought-leaderish just in case sama or pg wander by.
Obviously it's a moneymaker. The goodwill and the brand make money. The low-tech anti-modern anti-business aesthetic makes money. There's a reason this forum is a subdomain of a venture capital firm. I agree that they shouldn't (and probably won't) change in Reddit's direction but only because they don't need to. Why bother with ads when your entire culture is in essence an ad funnel?
As others will be quick to point out, HN does have ads in the form of job postings for YCombinator startups that are delivered inline with the links on the front page. That said, it's relatively unobtrusive. And of course, the existence of HN is a large part of the marketing for YCombinator itself. Personally, I'll commend dang for doing a high-effort job at moderation, and tolerating all the dunking on Paul Graham that we do.
HN is first and foremost a promotional and growth tool for Y Combinator, and only secondarily a discussion forum for technology enthusiasts. However, HN's branding has been so successful that the public perception of HN / news.yc is the complete inverse.
> "HN is a marketing machine for YCombinator, not a real community."
I disagree, a large percentage of people that are here for the interesting articles and curious discussion, but have no interest in YCombinator at all...
Eh, ycombinator definitely benefits from HN as an advertising method and has information on people that use HN, so there's only no sort of business relationship if you also believe that other major advertisers (such as Google) have no business relationship that applies.
Look, I think the message delivery here is very poor -- there's no need to be rude. And getting angry is uncalled for.
That said, I do agree with the sentiment expressed here: it is pretty amazing that a site that is really a nexus of high-tech Silicon Valley companies and figures -- quite possibly the most popular one in that segment -- still has downtime and a web interface reminiscent of the 1990s.
And I disagree with those people who say that the site is operated entirely altruistically. There's definitely a huge benefit to YCombinator -- not least of which is raising awareness of their investment opportunities. Also, YCombinator uses HN as a very effective advertisement medium for job offerings for the companies it has invested in. Companies would pay big money for that kind of exposure of their job ads here.
To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with the above motivations. I think it's great that Y Combinator is able to leverage HN is such a way. But I think HN does owe its audience a site that is run and managed in a manner befitting its status as a focal point of global high tech and entrepreneurship.
This is why I stopped calling HN, HN. It's YCombinator news. It's not news for hackers - maybe at one point, but not anymore and not for awhile. It may even be seen as looked down on because you're posting on a site run by venture capitalists.
>Are you sure about that? Plenty of large companies have worked to build cultures around their products. Should we really trust YCombinator's motives more than, say,
It's fine to be vigilant about subliminal marketing or secret motives (hailcorporate![1]) but I think in this case, HN is transparent in its goals.
If HN is brainwashing us to redefine "hacker" to suit their needs, what is their end game? HN doesn't have ads. They don't have constant popups nagging us to pay for a subscription. They do have periodic "YC Random Company is hiring" posts (if you consider those "ads"). But they also have the weekly hiring posts from non-YC companies. There are the weekly posts about "basic income" and "minimum wage should be $15" and "programmers should form a union" that routinely make the front page. Those are not topics the money men like to push. Any time a "Uber taxi" thread is posted, the top comments always complain about the "sharing-economy" being a VC-funded scam on society. Lastly, the vast majority of readers will never submit an application to YC so that link is also mostly irrelevant.
In other words, if HN is tricking us with a redefinition of "hacker" to suit their nefarious agenda, what have they gained and what did readers lose?
>It also happens to describe many (if not most) startup founders of the variety being criticized in the article.
Your interpretation of the article is incorrect. The article explains[2] how some startup entrepreneurs with counter-culture tendencies, rebellious attitudes, and subversive agendas can be neutered of their free spirit and be put into the service of entities with money (VCs, Barclay's so-called "hackathon", etc) -- the "yuppies".
The article is criticizing the "yuppies" and not the startup entrepreneurs that might enjoy articles currently on HN front page such as "Reversing NvAPI to Programmatically Overclock Nvidia GPUs" and "Go and Rust – objects without class (2013)"
>the top result has a plug for a startup called "ThriveSmart" and is basically how why some startup uses Rails
I guess one can see whatever they want to see. To me, that article is a Rails article, and the secondary trivia is that the company happens to be ThriveSmart. If that article was written anonymously with no company mentioned, one of the HN commenters would inevitably ask, "where do you work?" and the company name would be revealed in the comments. People try languages, frameworks, databases, and they also tend to work at companies. The company is part of the color of the presentation. If we got manipulated by ThriveSmart exposure 8 years ago, I don't see evidence of it. The other articles on the front page are topics hackers voted up. It doesn't mean every article is a programming article about Lisp or MongoDB.
>- just maybe - folks around here are taking the "hacker" part of "hacker news" too strongly at face value when its YC heritage ought to be warranting at least a small grain of salt, and that a lot may very well have changed in six years.
To proof to me is what types of articles show up on the front page. HN's audience is not all uber-Lisp clones of PG but the intended audience is definitely not the "yuppies" that the article is criticizing. I can't see how anyone can look at the HN front page as a whole and conclude it is designed for "yuppies" instead of "hackers".
[2]I believe there are so many misinterpretations of his thesis because he writes in a very convoluted style but here's an example excerpt of author's criticism of yuppies: "We are currently witnessing the gentrification of hacker culture. The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class. It began innocently, no doubt. The association of the hacker ethic with startups might have started with an authentic counter-cultural impulse on the part of outsider nerds tinkering away on websites. But, like all gentrification, the influx into the scene of successive waves of ever less disaffected individuals results in a growing emphasis on the unthreatening elements of hacking over the subversive ones."
I don't think that's HN and ycombinator. The original intent of HN was to support yc, an incubator that creates semi-giants like Airbnb and DoorDash. If push really comes to shove, most people here are going to look out for themselves. They may not like the current big tech companies, but probably would have no problem becoming the next one.
I think the comment was more about the YC ecosystem and less about the HN website specifically. The HN website exists because of YC, and YC has a lot of companies that rely on advertising.
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