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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

You are wary of them furthering their personal agenda. I quoted that.

There seems to be this assumption that good only occurs when some Christ-like martyr falls on their sword for the benefit of other people. The entire world seems to think that the only good men are dead men who died as martyrs to a cause and if someone is getting something out of the deal, they are evil predators.

I loathe this idea with every fiber of my being and would like to see it wholly stamped out of existence. I believe HN is as high quality a forum as it is because it has a purpose that serves the needs of the people who created it and run it.

I have done moderating for free. At the scale of HN, unpaid mods would absolutely not work. I wholly approve of them having a personal agenda here. I think the fact that they need to meet a standard of enlightened self interest is part of why they do so much better than most moderating teams.

Is that clearer?

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The best way to optimize HN's value to YC is simply by having it be as interesting as possible. Curiosity is the reason the community comes here, and the community coming here is why HN is valuable, so to do it any other way would trade a global optimum for a local one—basically trading the goose that lays golden eggs for some eggs. We're in an unusually fortunate position this way. If HN were a startup constantly needing to get its numbers up, we'd be under business pressure to do things that made HN less interesting. It's a happy coincidence that the most-interesting HN is also the HN that most serves YC's long-term interests.

Secondarily, HN has job ads and (more recently) 'Launch HNs' for startups that get special treatment. The job ads are written about in the FAQ and the launches eventually will be, but we're still figuring out the best way to do them. These are concessions HN grants to YC in return for being funded by YC, and our intent is to have them be both secondary and obvious. I agree that it's fair for HN to make these concessions and especially with your reason for saying so: it's the way to have a sustainably high-quality site, which does not come free. What HN doesn't do is make non-transparent concessions, like moderating anti-YC stories differently. But I've covered that elsewhere in the thread.

> "I wholly approve of them having a personal agenda here."

Any forum with a policy like that will never gain the credibility and respect that HN currently enjoys. If someone wants to create a private forum and moderate it in a way that furthers their personal agenda, as opposed to the community's interests, more power to them, but they should disclose it publicly. As community members, it is entirely reasonable if we ask them whether this is indeed the case.

Thankfully, Dang disagrees with you and isn't moderating HN in a personal-agenda-driven manner (see his post above).

Your reply suggests a huge disconnect between my meaning and your interpretation of my words.

Fwiw I hear you and Mz arguing much the same thing here. It's 'personal' in the sense of self-interested but not in the sense of a personal agenda beyond that... or at least we try hard not to be that way.

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