This is a cryptic post, what, in direct terms, happened?
If YC does an "Apply HN" thing again, no doubt the interview step will be in the announcement, but it wasn't this time.
The rest is just miscommunication and bad optics.
'What' did Pinboard supposedly win? I can't find any poll or submission that appears to be contentious. I searched HN https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22apply%20hn%22&sort=byPopula... and found this joke submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441480
I mean, I think I've pieced together what's happened, but I'm still fairly confused and feel like I'm missing a lot of context.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633278
And the "joke submission" wasn't joke at all
I think this interpretation gives YC too much credit -- it was clearly stated that all discussion would happen in public on HN, then they added a private interview without announcing that change, and the reason given for Maciej not passing the interview was that he made Kevin "uncomfortable" (which as many people noted in the thread, is basically Unconscious Bias 101). The optics of the affair were that the contest had been redesigned to exclude Maciej specifically.
I hope that for the next Apply HN there's no final vaperoom stage -- putting something to a vote them sending it off for final decision by the elite is not going to go well a second time. A better process might be an "Ask HN" for each finalist where the YC gatekeepers (along with HN members) could interview the applicant(s) in a public way.
Cryptic might be the wrong word, but having not been here for what happened as it happened, I'd say that trying to piece together what this OP post was about if this was your first exposure to the whole "Pick startups for YC to fund" idea is not at all trivial.
I skimmed enough of the two links dang posted above to know that it would take me more time than I was willing to devote to figure out exactly what went down. The way HN threads are presented makes sense when the threads are alive and active, but are terrible from a historical perspective of how things unfolded if you weren't there to see it live.
This post wasn't cryptic, but could have used a retrospective or summary of facts.
BUT, he "won" ApplyHN with more than double the votes of the next runner up:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22apply%20hn%22&sort=byPopula...
However, he was not selected and there was this post to the winner's announcement yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633278 making it appear there was some bias involved.
FWIW, Pinboard is awesome.
Pinboard won overwhelmingly but was disqualified based on a private, ambiguous, and somewhat troubling conversation that took place outside of HNews threads (where Pinboard's founder made the YCombinator partner interviewing him "unconfortable" for unspecified reasons).
When people expressed reservations about this, the story was revised: The YCombinator partner actually believed that Pinboard's application was just a joke, and in any case Pinboard had violated a secret/unwritten rule not to solicit votes outside of HNews, which disqualified them anyhow.
As todays announcement probably made clear, that didn't really solve the problem, because it felt way too much like "We don't like Pinboard's founder, and we'll revise the rules until he loses." Not saying in any way that's what happened, but that's the optics.
Anyhow, I'm glad things are resolved, it seems everyone walked away reasonable happy, and YCombinator seems to have moved quickly and decisively to draw a line under it and move on. However...
...in my personal view the problem arose 100% because of a series of poor decisions by YCombinator. :(
Edit: The conditions of winning were described as "At the end of the month, we'll rank the startups and YC will fund two. The ranking will depend both on upvotes and on the quality of discussion, similar to how the ranking of stories works. We can talk about this in the comments, but to answer one question I know will come up: Upvotes are an important factor but they're too brittle to rely on exclusively; doing so would encourage the wrong kind of trying to game the system. So we're going to gauge community interest both by upvotes and comments, and in case of doubt I'll make the final call—or better, figure out a way to put the final call to the community." The problem is that 1) the contest was expressed as "find us someone to fund", not "find us someone to interview", and 2) Pinboard wasn't disqualified based on either upvotes or comments, but based on other factors not mentioned in the post.
This is understated. dang is on the record ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11636651 ) that that's exactly what happened.
Man, I keep running across comments from YCombinator that just make this sound worse and worse.
"He made me uncomfortable" "It wasn't a serious application" "He'd be a bad fit" "He vote brigaded"
Which just makes it look like you're throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. My advice, put down the shovel and stop digging the hole deeper.
"the simple answer is he won the votes, he won the poll, but he made me feel uncomfortable in the end. I went into my good-faith phone call with him very much wanting this to work out and I was disappointed to come out of it tense and with less energy than when I went in. It’s touchy feely, I know, but the truth."
"We revised the rules when it became clear that Kevin wouldn't include Pinboard in the YCF program"
It's seriously hard to even keep track of the different conflicting stories. :)
dang, I think the criticism you're getting is unfair considering the openness with which you conduct yourself. You could have easily avoided trouble by being secretive, but you didn't. I hope you don't let a contigent of vocally pedantic people discourage you from continuing your experimentation, which benefits us all when done so openly.
Beyond that, I don't know. I hadn't followed all the action closely enough.
Seemed to be:
Something won a vote People running the vote decided they didn't like the outcome so they ignored the vote.
It's basically Boaty McBoatface again with similar lessons of "don't run online polls".
I was tempted to draw that conclusion too, but decided it's important to resist. Finding new ways to productively engage this community is a big deal to us. We obviously have a lot to learn, so screw-ups are inevitable, but we're ok with that as long as we can make them right.
Fooy McFooface is the inevitable outcome of online polls which are open to the entire internet, allow arbitrary submissions, and can have traffic easily driven to them. Other forms of online polling -- high-turnout votes with a preset voters list, polls which are hidden away in unlinkable parts of member-only sites, or polls with a moderated list of options, for example -- don't have those problems.