From what I can tell, YCombinator has 3 main purposes:

1. Teaching people that money is the only thing in the universe that matters

2. Starting companies, or whatever

3. Funding Hacker News

Well, in our modern age, we don't need YCombinator to do those things. You can learn (1) just by reading Hacker News comments, and people do (2) without YCombinator all the time. Therefore, we can replace YCombinator just by finding someone else to run Hacker News. But as it turns out, there's an innovative organization lobste.rs, that's willing to do just that. You can read more about why we don't need YCombinator in this book[1], written by one of the world's leading economists.

[1] amazon.com/dp/0140445684/