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.
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?
>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."
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).
No one at YC thinks of HN that way. I certainly don't. If we did, we'd run HN very differently.
You're also wrong about why HN exists. pg created it for a bunch of reasons. Some had nothing at all to do with YC (e.g. wanting interesting things to read, once Reddit stopped being that for him; and wanting to make a web app in Arc) and others did. All of those reasons are still alive today, so your interpretation is much too reductionist.
It's true there are job ads for YC startups, and Launch HN threads for YC startups get placed on the front page (this is all in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). I'd like to hear what you think we should do instead. Surely you don't think HN should give nothing back to YC in exchange for funding it?
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 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...
There are profit motives and Y Combinator is being transparent on this. From the FAQ [1]:
> Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down and fall steadily. Only one is on the front page at a time. The rest are listed at jobs.
>
> What's the relationship between YC and HN?
> Y Combinator owns and funds HN. The HN team is editorially independent.
> HN gives three features to YC: job ads (see above) and startup launches get placed on the front page, and YC founder names are displayed to other YC alumni in orange.
But HN seems incentivized to keep the level of quality high and to not interfere too much with content beyond moderation, or people would leave. So it leaves us with good quality contents and discussions.
HN's incentives are well-aligned with serving its users best, and this is probably partly what makes it a good place.
> HN is ultimately just a podium for YC companies to market themselves.
That's irrelevant for the question. The question is about the the value of HN regardless of its intended purpose (which is of course open to speculation).
To me, your tone seems a bit derogatory. I don't know if you intend to be that way, but if you were, please don't be. HN surely takes some effort and is hugely valuable to me, and I would rather have those who keep things running feel good about it. Even if it weren't perfectly altruistic, I'd say it's still a win-win for all of us, don't you think?
On the flipside - Let's not act like ycombinator doesn't benefit from hn. YCombinator gets free advertising to a TON of good engineers for their companies roles (the posts that you can't comment on that mention X random ycombinator company is looking for Y role). Surely that has to be worth something...
I don't disagree with pg's statement here, but IMO yc gets pretty big benefit from running the forum.
We go out of our way to moderate threads less when a YC startup is involved (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), but your behavior in this thread has been so egregious that I don't have a choice. "Less" doesn't mean "zero".
There are other business models that work (like MetaFilter -- very different model but still a business). HN is part of the Y Combinator business model in that you must have (last I checked) a Hacker News handle to fill out the application for Y Combinator. Every founder has to have their own handle. So it is a funnel and things you say here are kind of de facto part of the application. Thus, being a jackass here on a routine basis can hurt your chances of getting in. For other people, who have no plans to apply to Y Combinator, there is still, yes, a lot of money of the table for many people. Also, because it is part of their business model, they now have a full time paid moderator, something boards done out of the goodness' of someone's heart cannot afford. The difference in quality shows.
Y-Combinator maintains this platform ( in my own opinion ) for two reasons
1) it's a neat place for likeminded people to share and discuss interesting topics
2) this is a byproduct of 1. by gaining popularity from 1. they gain more exposure to a lot of smart people, which turns out great when they post job ads, or new companies reveals, as well as a lot of people apply to y-combinator, which in turn means they get to be very picky in who they invest.
But HN doesn't have a business model per se. same with Reddit communities.
HN is a large international community with people from many walks of life, and the vast majority have no connection to venture capital or anything like it.
HN does care about growth as it does have moderators and methods to make sure that it is engaging with the right audience for Y combinator. And the profit motive is there, as a pipeline into YCombinator, you can see from many of the well integrated ads. Just because it is done so well, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Having been someone who has benefitted hugely from this I have no problem with it however
I hope (and also believe) that HN isn't quite that harsh. People post a lot of friendly and supportive comments as well. But there's a cognitive bias we all have where negative things make deeper impressions than positive ones, so even 10% negative probably counts for as much as 90% positive.
A lot of it has to do with the initial conditions of how you present; as it says at https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html, if you try to sell this audience, they will close the tab (and maybe flame you first). But just telling about the project in a factual and personal way - what problem it solves, how you came to work on it, and explaining what's different about the solution, tends to seed discussion in a good direction.
I wish you'd submit some of your apps to HN! If you want to run a draft by me at hn@ycombinator.com, I'm always happy to help HN users (whether they're YC founders or not) in the same sort of way. I just can't necessarily reply very quickly.
Y-Combinator uses Hacker News as a vehicle to attract the best technology talent in the world and display job openings to that talent. I love HN and have no issues with YC doing that, but let's not pretend that it is entirely altruistic.
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.
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