Ask HN: What is Hacker News's business model?
I know HN is owned by Y-Combinator. But, as a popular and homogeneous platform there must be many possible ways to earn from it. So what is HN's business model and how its value is measured?
1) Top of the funnel lead gen for emerging companies (for YC to invest in).
2) Persistent advertising for the YC brand. You can’t use HN without associating it with Y Combinator and by being useful it brings in millions of views to the brand at relatively little cost
3) A proprietary way to learn more about the founders they invest in. I’ve read a users HN profile (what they like dislike, quality of comments) is an important source of unadulterated intel.
As for value, I wouldn’t know how to calculate it but given the size of their “classes” and speed of rise, it clearly serves as a very effective in bound funnel for investing in quality startups. Definitely in the millions, not sure if billions unless it directly contributed to their biggest and best investments.
EDIT: I’ve left out other ancillary benefits like a distribution platform for YC companies looking to hire and such.
Lastly, value is relative. The value of HN to YC (or to perhaps other VCs) is larger than the value to say me who couldn’t make as much use of the benefits enumerated above. There are a lot of intangibles here.
Sometimes I notice someone doing interesting work on HN and get in touch with them and try to convince them to apply to YC. I'd like to do more of that.
What better than to run a "news site", know what your users (who many are C levels, or VC projects by YC) are watching and how and when they are commenting. By running that, they can glean an impressive amount of proprietary information.
YC can also control the narrative. "Voting ring detectors", shadowbans, blacklist names on articles all have a real and a hidden reason. And with no transparency, how do we know what they're doing and why?
And did you know there's a secret YC-founder only feature. founders funded under YC can see each other as orange usernames. The rest of us.. Well. They can collaborate publicly as a bloc but the rest of us are none-the-wiser.
Anything that's posted by a company's founders in a public forum can hardly be considered "proprietary information". Anyone in the world can read anything on HN as easily as Twitter, Reddit, etc.
This. I've been noticing a lot of flagging lately.
The last one was criticizing Apple.
Edit: we don't moderate HN based on who is being criticized or praised, be it Apple or anyone else. If you're noticing stories criticizing Apple getting removed, you're probably a critic of Apple. If you were a fan of Apple, you'd notice stories praising Apple getting removed. I call this the notice-dislike bias (crappy name, but I don't know a better one): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... This bias dominates people's perceptions of HN to such an extent that I don't think I've ever seen a single counterexample.
Moderators sometimes turn flags off. Moderators also sometimes put [flagged] on comments, though that's rare. But if you see [flagged] on a story, that's because users flagged it.
Your claim would be more persuasive if you gave us a few specific examples.
Can't you do this on any forum by having your co-conspirators install some sort of a userscript/userstyle? I guess it's more convenient to do it on the site yourself if you own it, but it's not exactly that much of a competitive advantage.
Also sorry, but there are no hidden reasons. Here's why: we don't do things that aren't defensible to the community in the first place. That way when questions come up, we can answer them publicly in good conscience. Maybe the answers won't convince you (though we can dream!) but I believe that the bulk of the community does find them convincing, because if they didn't we'd never hear the end of it. Occasionally we screw up and do something that the community strongly dislikes, but in that case the solution is clear: say sorry and stop doing it.
The voting ring detector prevents abuses like people upvoting their own or friends' posts. Shadowbanning is mostly for new accounts that show signs of being spammers or trolls; if an account has an established history, we say that we're banning it and explain why. I don't know what "blacklist names on articles" means but anything like that would have an easily explainable reason too.
There's plenty of transparency in the sense that there's no question people can't get an answer to if they simply ask. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... We answer such questions every day, just like I'm doing here, though you didn't ask.
Sinister terms like "market manipulation", "collusion", "control the narrative" are impossible to answer because they don't mean anything specific. If you or anyone were to spell out exactly what you mean by them, it would be easy to clarify what we do and don't do, and why.
YC founders don't collaborate as a bloc on HN and the same anti-voting-ring and other anti-abuse measures apply to them as to all users. pg added the orange usernames in the early days of HN and YC, as a way to help the early YC community get to know each other. It's a perk, for sure, but more a kind of flair than some sort of secret power.
Have I missed anything?
Ingenuity of course is sprinkling marketing material on top of community-created content. Compare it to Joel’s approach: produce interesting content and then use your blog to promote your companies. Worked out for Joel, but it just doesn’t scale well.
Ironically it’s a bit neglected: it was unreadable on mobile devices for years, had no folding, etc. A bit of Reddit-like features would go a long way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/launches
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
YC and other VCs can't continue to exist if people don't continue to believe in the mythology of silicon valley. Who the hell will work ridiculous hours and gamble with their livelihood to make some worthless app? All in exchange for equity worth less than lottery tickets.
Somehow people post these things without realizing that cynicism about VC, Silicon Valley, and startups became the conventional position on HN many years ago, and that far from a contrarian view it's a platitude.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285793
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
1) it's a neat place for likeminded people to share and discuss interesting topics
2) this is a byproduct of 1. by gaining popularity from 1. they gain more exposure to a lot of smart people, which turns out great when they post job ads, or new companies reveals, as well as a lot of people apply to y-combinator, which in turn means they get to be very picky in who they invest.
But HN doesn't have a business model per se. same with Reddit communities.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, Bill, the profit motive is what sustains capitalism." Yes, and our sex drive is what sustains the human species, but we don't try to fuck everything.
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2. ???
3. Profit!
More seriously, I thought HN was a showcase for arc.