I don't know how Hacker News manages to stay so pure, given that it's run by venture capitalists, yet still remains free of ads and open to newcomers. Monetising CS is like demanding a signup fee to join HN: it will drastically change the community.
This site is a lot less brazen that, say the Gates Foundation or Jack Dorseys "all the strings attached" charity "donations", but there's no doubt it's run in the interests of YC and they're doing it for the benefits they get.
Not that I begrudge them that. It just needs to be something you bear in mind when wondering about odd looking article rankings or apparent voting/submission patterns that evade the fraud detection... It's their space, they can do that if they want. I (and everyone else) needs to weight up the benefit to themselves against the benefit to the people in control, and determine whether to hang around here, or walk away. For me? They do an OK job of not taking too m much advantage of their ultimate power here. I'm mostly cool with them.
I’m not sure where I personally sit, but I think it’s a bit silly to pretend that YC is universally beloved or beyond reproach.
Personally, YC’s involvement in AirBnB is my biggest complaint with the company. I’m not sure how it looked from the inside before hand, but in retrospect AirBnB is one of the poster children of VC backed companies extracting profits at the cost of society, and I suspect that they probably should’ve known better.
Do you have any evidence to back up that claim? Because hard data shows exactly the opposite: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/beyond-bls/how-airbnb-has-...
You also haven’t provided any evidence to back up your claim. I’d be curious to read it, if it exists.
Studies into various markets have shown that AirBnB increases rent for residents by converting long term rentals to short term rentals, reducing housing supply. The question is whether or not the increased tourism offsets the damage caused to the housing market. Studies point towards the answer being “no”.
Source: https://www.epi.org/files/pdf/157766.pdf
This is not an out there theory on my part; the name for this is the “AirBnB effect”, and searching for that shows articles in Forbes, EPI (linked), the Guardian, The Harvard Business Review, among others.
The EPI thinktank report you linked to simply states the costs outweigh the benefits without any numbers to support that conclusion. This paper, on the other hand, does look at the numbers. I appreciate the reference, however.
I'm reminded of Paul Graham's words on unions:
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en
From his perspective, it could be that society is something standing in the way of profits.
That should tell you something important about them.
The fact that YC doesn't need to monetize HN , and others mentioned how so much talented is sourced here is what makes it a good and comfortable place for technologists and tech enthusiasts.
Although, I am still a wee bit dissappointed at the lack of discussion about actual hacking.
And what does any of that have to do with YC?
The site is literally news.ycombinator.com... and you're surprised it's slated towards ycombinator?
I'm a little skeptical of this. Don't get me wrong, I understand that it's not going to win any ACM awards for innovation in web development - it's a simple web app. I know this. But I think it's well beyond the 2-day prototype mark.
Because I know what a cheapo off-the-shelf, 2-day-product or PHP forum feels like, and Hacker News doesn't feel like that. It's a little more fine-grained and thoughtful than that.
The design, and probably countless little feature improvements that take time to make: I think these have accreted over time, a tiny bit at a time. And for what it's worth, getting comments to nest (stored in DB, parent, child, child of child etc.) and then to show that correctly in the UI isn't quite as easy as people who haven't attempted it might think.
And then things like downvoted comments being faded, next page loading at screen bottom, setting up the API... it all adds up.
As I typed this I realized how unsubstantiated this claim looks, and to be frank the cost of just doing this isn't even that high, so I'm probably just going to do this next weekend for giggles. Let's see!
If you really wish to go back to the original view, you should consider giving Netflix dvd a try. You get DVDs and on top of it the original site with five star ratings, predicted rating and most importantly the ability to sort by predicted rating in any genre!
I'm not sure about that. HN is moderated very effectively. I couldn't comment on the workload there, not being a moderator.
Plus: there are a shitload of people from all over the world here, ranging from broke devs in "third world countries" over German journalists to US VC CEOs. HN is essentially a gateway to a lot of influential people... a "soft power" in politics terms. And one with real monetary value as HN is an excellent place for new YC companies to get users, staff, or a network. An advantage that other VC funds do not have.
I think it may be just one now - sctb's last comment here was 8 months ago.
we're still the product https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
it's mutually beneficial, compared to say straight up advertising, but still.
It's heavily moderated, more so than Reddit. Right now is an interesting time because COVID posts are weighted to quickly fall off the front page (I'm not really complaining, this is a tech link site and I can see how those get annoying; no one wants to think about that right now, but if you see one of those threads, they are some of the most interesting and controversial, so check them out before they fall off).
Agreed. There is no shortage of COVID coverage, like, everywhere so I'm glad that they slide away quickly.
That said, I do appreciate the hard looks the HN crowd takes on some of the posted studies.
2. Light curation (pushing posts that aren’t a “good fit” down the rankings; asking people to resubmit good submissions that flopped)
3. I feel like it’s changed quite a lot in the last 10 years or so I’ve been reading the site. The popular topics have changed. I see fewer of some kinds of stupid comment and more of other kinds of stupid comment. But it’s hard to describe what the changes are.
Networks are so valuable and important to success it’s actually kind of crazy that surveillance and advertising is the only strategy most social networks have been able to come up with so far.
And I’d call a comment a form of socializing. Who knows? A maybe one of your comments here put the seed in someone’s head to launch a new startup. That seems like the kind of socializing YC would be interested in fostering to me.