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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I understand that you're not referring to the post on HN that got killed but to the activity on their website.

What happened there is no different than what happens when someone posts a spreadsheet with useful stuff here. Within minutes it will get destroyed or defaced.

The 'griefers' have definitely discovered HN. I suspect that some of them are people that took rejection by YC a bit harder than they should have, and that some others are simply here because they can't see a good thing without being tempted to try to destroy it.

Anything - and I really mean anything - that you put out there on the internet needs to be designed with abuse in mind, because no matter how small it is the abusers will seek it out and will try to destroy it.

That's something that you need to be aware of as much as you need to be a coder or a designer when you plan on making a living online.

Better get used to it.

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I suspect that some of them are people that took rejection by YC a bit harder than they should have, and that some others are simply here because they can't see a good thing without being tempted to try to destroy it.

It's almost entirely the latter. Only a small percentage of HN users actually apply to YC, and I can only think of one who became abusive on HN after being rejected (and he sent me an email recently apologizing).

Most of the nastiness we get here is from new users who show up and think they can behave like they do on other sites. This has been happening for years. But I wouldn't attribute to them such complex motives as not being able to see a good thing without being tempted to destroy it. I think they're just 13, or nuts.

Only a small percentage of HN users actually apply to YC

Slightly off-topic, but what about the inverse of that: how many YC applicants are active HN users [1]? Just curious as to how much of the applicant pool comes from HN.

1. Since you have to create a HN account to apply, I'm assuming 100% of YC applicants are HN users, so maybe how many actively participate?

Also interesting would be to get an idea of what percentage of people who get accepted into YC participate actively on HN.

That would be hard to reconstruct, because we don't keep track of people's karma at the point when we accept them, but we usually have 1 or 2 startups per batch with founders whose usernames I recognize as being top contributors. 6 of the 100 users on the leaderboard are YC founders.

Yeah, I think YC applicants or founders is statically insignificant, but I think your total user base is just as insignificant as this since it doesn't tell us much about what stories are showing up on the front-page and who is saying what about it. Instead, considering you're still only interested in comments, what if you filtered your user base for anyone that has posted a comment in the last 30 days then extrapolated the proportion of comments posted given a threshold of karma or "days alive" on HN against everyone else in your user base.

I think it's more revealing this way if you are interested in how increased traffic and site participation is effecting this 6% you mentioned above or that "days alive" value; IOW, how is increased traffic and new user participation effecting the rate at which this sample is posting comments?

In the end, I don't think increased traffic is effecting the discussion to the extent that it really matters; I think what really keeps everyone else in check is the frequency at which older members are posting comments.

I know my HN participation dropped offer during my summer in YC...understandably so given how busy I was. It's picked up more now and is probably about at the same level as before I started YC.

I was amazed that PG recognized my username at the acceptance brunch...I guess his statistics might explain why (I had ~1,000 karma but it was built up from small posts/comments, nothing too controversial).

17% of people who've applied for w2011 have over 100 karma:

    > (let ids (applicant-ids "w2011") 
        (percent (/ (count [> (uvar _ karma) 100] ids) 
                    (len ids)))) 
    17

6% have over 1000 karma.

Does this percentage include other applying co-founders in the application, or just the lead applicants?

Just the leads.

Cheers pg. The reason I asked was because when my cofounder and I submitted our application for w2011, we decided to use his account as the lead even though I had way more karma, which was due to him having a much cooler answer to the non-computer hack question specifically addressed at only the lead.

Anyway, not that it matters since a good application is still a good one (and vice versa), but it's possible to find a higher YC/HN participation rate if you include the cofounders.

> I suspect that some of them are people that took rejection by YC a bit harder than they should have

This was in part because some of the stuff I saw tossed around was very strongly targeted at YC and you personally, not so much against HN.

But I'll take your word for it and I really hope that those that get rejected by YC see it for what it is and don't take it personal.

That's just the topic that people are most likely to be defensive about here. It's probably a natural instinct for groups to test and provoke each other by the things which are most distinctive to them.

Economic interdependence is what drives the niceness here. Anyone who seriously cares about startups or hacking and wants to benefit from this crowd is likely to follow the guidelines as best they can.

But people lacking the same incentives will probably unknowingly slide into some form of bad behavior even if they've been active on the site for years - it will just happen naturally, because their economic equation is "amuse myself" with no mitigating factors. But most of the time it probably doesn't cause overt vandalism, just poor commenting hygiene.

>But people lacking the same incentives will probably unknowingly slide into some form of bad behavior even if they've been active on the site for years - it will just happen naturally, because their economic equation is "amuse myself" with no mitigating factors. But most of the time it probably doesn't cause overt vandalism, just poor commenting hygiene.

I am not so sure about that - I come here and post comments in the hope that people will like them (doesn't work that well) because I derive my sense of worth from how much karma I have

Can't be the only one.

I personally feel a tiny amount of satisfaction in contributing something meaningful to a conversation, and I like to try and keep overall contributions to a community posative because if everyone did that it would make the community a better place for me.

Arguably selfish motivations, but they work out well for everyone.

Moreover I think that since these people can't express their nastiness directly, they go and "retaliate" on target websites.

I never read comments under the articles linked here because I know they are polluted by a lot of useless noise, so I just read comments here on HN. But it could be interesting to see if nasty comments related to HN, like the ones mentioned by the OP, appear in other places as well (not that we can do anything about it, anyway).

Again off topic.

What percentage of HN users apply to YC?

  >>  I suspect that some of them are people that took rejection by YC a bit harder than they should have

I suspect anyone with enough drive to get a funding decision from YC (even a negative one) will be moving on to new opportunities, not defacing websites.

I think you might be surprised. There are plenty of people with drive but no morals.

it's hard to build a network without morals.

These people are not "sociopaths" (nasty, effective) but "trolls" (nasty, losers): what do they have to gain?

I'll answer your question with another:

What does a hacker have to gain from taking something apart, poking at it, and putting it back together again?

You gain knowledge of how things work, even if it's not anything that can be learned implicitly by looking at the insides of something you can get a general idea of how pieces fit together and can hopefully take something away from it that you might not have known before.

Also you gain skill of knowing that you can take something apart and be able to put everything back together again, which is often harder than it sounds.

Absolutely.

The answer that's related that I was trying to elicit is "because it interests me to know how things work." By the same token, trolls derive the same sort of intellectual pleasure from trolling: to anger someone is to own them. They do it "because I can."

Real trolls aren't the ones that are going "lulz obama is a socialist," "ruby is better than python," or anything so obvious. The real trolls are the ones that sound reasonable, but slowly end up destroying your community by creating discord much more subtly.

I suspect that some of them are people that took rejection by YC a bit harder than they should have

This is a worrisome statement. You get enough flags on a submission and it's automatically deleted, right?

The YC deadline is coming up in two days. Should we not submit cool new hacks to YC right now? It seems like people who are insecure about their applications might be incentivized to kill submissions where people demo something cool, under the premise that they want to stifle potential competition for YC slots. (Which is dumb, because the URL will still be on the application, but I never said this was rational.)

[edit: I know jacquesm was talking about previous YC applicants, but this led me to speculate on whether flaggings were performed by current YC applicants.]

You are misinterpreting what I wrote I think.

I did not mean that you should not be submitting cool new hacks here, that's no problem at all.

What I meant was that there may be characters out there that have been rejected by YC in the past that vent their frustration by being less than good citizens of HN.

So it's nothing to do with people that are insecure about their applications or submissions to HN today, it's got to do with people that were rejected during previous rounds that took it personal instead of as constructive criticism and/or limited resources.

I think it's also people who are scared of subjecting themselves to criticism, so they have to criticize others who share what they perceive as low-quality material that gets positive attention. It's a self-defense mechanism: he shouldn't be allowed to share his stuff because it's not good enough == I don't have to share my stuff and subject myself to outside criticism because it's not good enough.

> that you put out there on the internet

You can add to that list the medium of books, articles, presentations, artwork, fiction, poetry, non-fiction, drawings, music, film, interviews, and and other vehicle for personal expression.

You should expect abuse, but I think the OP is taking issue with the fact that HNers are the ones who are being abusive.

To those who would be abusive, all I have to say is to remember that everyone begins somewhere. There was a time when you yourself was very mediocre at coding. And if your work had been completely trashed, how likely would you have been to pursue a career in programming?

You don't need to be a HN'er to follow a link from HN to somewhere and start making a jerk of yourself. I don't see any proof that these people are 'HN'ers' other than that they are able to follow a link. They're just jerks, the kind that infest each and every place on the web where more than 10 people gather in order to spoil the mood.

I'm sure it's more people who troll forums and cause trouble in general than people who applied to YC. There are always malcontents and people engaging in immature behavior in any group, especially public groups where one can be anonymous.

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