Ask HN: Does HN "help" upvoting posts by YC-backed companies?

6 points·rifme··6 comments

One post by a YC-backed company was on the frontpage for some hours, got 30'ish upvotes and landed on page two rather quickly. Then, some hours later it was back on the frontpage with over 300 votes.

If I understand the HN algorithm correctly, it is unlikely that this happens organically or am I totally wrong?

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HN is an independent entity within YC, and it wouldn't be in their interest to play favorites. Instead, they focus on making the front page as intellectually gratifying as possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

If the story was bumped to the front page, it's because it was substantive, not because it was from a YC co.

Yeah, unfortunately, there are de facto voting blocs on HN these days. It wasn't always like this.

But now there are 10,000 YC affiliated people, 50,000 from Google/Microsoft/Amazon, etc and so it totally skews the results towards these larger organizations.

I would be happy if users were asked to provide their Bigco employer in a private field, and then I could filter out their votes by visiting /nobigco or something.

But ideally, voting on stories/comments related to your own BigCo employer would be disabled entirely.

It appears they do. Right now, #7 on the front page is a YC company with no points or comment count associated with their post.

https://imgur.com/m7HzrHs

That's a YC job ad, those are different from submissions (which the parent is to be talking about) and are the only public "benefit" YC companies get on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7571449

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987870

Thanks for the links. Makes sense.

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