I've always viewed it as more of a hacker's hangout with the unfortunate side-effect of being YC-sponsored being that you sometimes have to put up with some dumb corporate news here and there, but it seems to be going in a slightly different direction for a while now (or more likely I was just always wrong on this one :P).
Wait this is a startup forum? I totally ignore the more business aspect of hacker news. I don't really care about YC that much, I would argue that Reddit has better discussions nowadays.
Hosting, curating, and moderating Hacker News is certainly adjacent to YC's business and ostensibly has some profit motive. I appreciate that it's also a dark-pattern-free public service, but it's not a coincidence that one of the best tech news and discussion boards is hosted by one of the premier incubator/accelerator shops.
I started reading HN because I thought I was joining a community of hackers -- technical people who were using their skills to make their way in the world. I came here specifically because of startups. At the time (HN was new), people who participated were supposed to be better-known by the YC folks and have a better chance of getting into YC.
Not only did I not get into YC, the conversation quickly became "stuff that hackers like". Folks got tired of marketing, business models, coding, and other detailed startup stuff. Startup stuff became less about "Hey, I'm doing X, how does Y work?" and more about celebrity bloggers. Then MSM posts, then the rags, and so forth.
Now it's like a reddit-lite. I'm not complaining, just pointing out that yes, there has been a big drift from where it started to where it is today.
And if anybody knows where the new HN is, please email me. Sure would be nice to hang out someplace like that.
That's not bad per-se IMHO, after all still HN even with the "ghost news" appearing and all the rest is a decent place.
What is a big issue IMHO is that, given it's starting to be obvious how important is to have a completely neutral HN-style news site for hackers world-wide, nobody tried to do a serious no-profit to create a replacement that is able to guarantee a more democratic and not interested management.
So YC does a good job at taking HN not too business-driven, but still HN community does a very poor job at trying to start something completely not-business-related.
Please no, I joined YC to get away from the politics that have taken over reddit and Digg. I like this place for it's tech and entrepreneurship news, not these stories.
> FWIW, I've seen no discernible drop in quality since I registered here about a year ago.
It already changed by the time you joined. News.yc used to be primarily about subjects that interested entrepreneurial programmers. It still is to a degree but now it's mainly another variant of Slashdot.
That's ridiculous. It's just making clear what should have been clear from the start, which is that news.yc is news for Y Combinator people, not just about their startups.
Hacker News is also much less bland. And for those hackers who don't think they're interested in startups, it's more tempting! (Muhahaha! Come, hackers, and catch the chronic startup syndrome!)
I think your answer begins with the site's full name: Hacker News Network (HNN). It's not about hacking, per se. It's about aggregating news and tech articles and occasional solicitations from YC's startups that are likely of interest to developers and other tech folk, originally those in the San Francisco area startup community where its owner YCombinator (YC) is based (a startup incubator).
I think HNN's original intent was to help startup staff to make connections with potential partners and domain subject matter experts (which can be difficult if you're new to an industry, as many at startups are). In time, the site has evolved, broadening its agenda and its geography as its participants grew and diversified.
The conversations that ensue are echoes of participants who have trod the path described in each article, or more typically, have insights or opinions. If you find that amusing or edifying, you'll stay. If you don't, you'll leave. Apparently you don't.
Don't forget one of the side functions of hacker news is advertising for YC. There's a reason hacker news is news.ycombinator.com and not it's own separate domain.
I think that's a side-effect from allowing control of our industry messaging board to rest in the hands of YC instead of the community. I've actually hoped that the balance would swing back to /r/programming where moderation is done by the community. Also the revenue to keep the site running would be generated by neutral-ish advertising instead of YC gaining value by being able to push their own startups.
I suppose that this is a strange thing to say, as I work at a YC company which takes advantage of those connections... In fact we maybe draw on it too much (I do work at Clever, sorry if our posts bothered you!).
Overall, I think YC are pretty benign overlords, and they have an incentive to not rock the boat. YMMV though :)
Second what Dean said. Lots of good hacker news places. Very few good early stage startup stuff. Too conflate what YC was with TC is silly. TC is a profile site. YC.news gathers helpful articles on how make your startup better.
I'll miss YC news if it becomes just another programmer site.
not everything on yc is just startup/business centric; that ended a while back.
That's why its named changed from startup news into hacker news (I still remember complaining to pg about the name change - though now I've changed my mind)
What's wrong with discussing a chemical? We've been doing that a long time already on hacker news
one more edit: another thing that hacker news brings is a dif perspective on an issue (as opposed to just flame wars like on other sites - I guess I am an idealist at heart)
Understood. However, I think that the fact that it's a YC company makes it relevant for this site, which is why it's "still allowed to pollute Hacker News".
Seemed friendly enough in 2010. There was a lot less news cycle discussion and more tech (but less product) discussion, so that might have been alienating. Also a lot more YC specific stuff, so maybe that felt elitist.
The culture has shifted over the last 15 years or so. Initially it was indeed for YC and YC adjacent founders, but it evolved into a general tech news and tech workers forum. I'm not sure of any other good startup-specific forum that hasn't descended into spamming links rather than cultivating good discussion.
I'd like to believe that it's because YC is actually beneficial. After all, a new startup by a founder of Reddit was going to get lots of attention regardless.
One of the other commenters brought up an interesting point: the audience for HN and the teams YC pick are completely different demographic groups.
I don't think it started out that way; in fact I know it didn't. But over time we went from "watercooler for hackers" to "stuff that interests hackers" to "stuff that interests hacker wannabes" to something-else, not sure what to call it. Maybe "stuff that hacker wannabes like and most techies are interested in"
That probably sounds overly-critical of HN, and I apologize if I could have said it better. I just don't think the comparison works the way this author intended it to.
The key issue here is this: does HN have a progression? Is there some sort of goal where after consuming it for a while you become a better person or learn something useful about the world or yourself? (useful enough to offset the time you spend here) In YC there's a format, a goal, clear steps, and you're going somewhere. HN -- anymore? -- it's a hangout. A place you could spend all day picking up little shiny things.
I believe it would be very easy to find more value added by HN, here and there. One guy learns how to program, one guy hooks up with a founder, one guy learns critical things about startups, and so on. And I think if you added up all of those cherry-picked cases, you'd probably end up with more value than YC (for some definition of the word "value"). As an aggregate, however, it's a no-brainer. YC wins. They teach teams to have a clearly-defined external goal and then teams begin a journey towards reaching that goal.
(Note that you can't do this analysis with numbers. This is an entirely subjective question along the lines of "Do you like ice cream?" and should be treated as such)
reply