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Comment by kwis | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting, but is it useful for a busy founder?

Or to make that more concrete, would you forward that link to multiple portfolio CEOs and suggest they take time out of their day to read it and discuss it?

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Not sure what 'founders' and 'CEOs' have to do with hacker news.

I assumed that the target market for HN is people in startups and people about to start startups.

That said, if the target market is just 'hackers', just modify my question to refer to 'hackers' rather than 'founders'.

HN is for hackers, not startup founders. There just ends up being a disproportionate amount of stuff about startups, because YC is in the startup business.

Clearly not everybody reads the site guidelines. Perhaps enforcing that periodically would help.

And therein lies the problem. As HN and Y Combinator itself have grown, as well as the general startup climate, HN has become increasingly startup focused to the point where many would describe it as "for startup founders" rather than "for hackers". And there are a lot of new users who like it that way (or assume it's supposed to be that way). But then you have the old guard like tptacek who would like nothing more than to see HN filled with only hard tech/science posts. That's a gap that isn't going to be filled with any algorithmic tweak or new comment layout.

I would strongly prefer an HN that only had startup posts. I think this part of the thread is going off the rails, though. The problem is, "how do you improve comment quality on HN". We can probably avoid debating the premise of the question, and just focus on the (plentiful) ideas themselves.

Hey, when I joined it was called "Startup News".

This tiff seems to highlight what's perhaps the problem: is there really agreement & understanding on what HN is supposed to be about?

It's interesting, but is it useful for a busy founder?

Aren't founders as busy as they are in part because they hope to reach the top 1 percent of income in their country? I would want to know what my country's policies are toward high-income people, and what social trends are influencing those policies, if I were pursuing a high-wealth business result, as at least some founders are.

I think political stories and economic trends that relate to startups would also be appropriate (for example startup visas, growth of middle-class in China) as these are area that impact startups in the long term.

Obviously if the discussion on these threads is purely political then they probably shouldn't have a place here.

I don't see a guideline saying something has to be useful or forwardable among CEOs.

I'll go ahead and suggest, since it's on topic in this thread, that passive aggressive snark like this is one source of HN's decline.

One can disagree without being snarky and disagreeable.

How was it passive aggressive or snarky?

Perhaps it was intended as a non-snarky, non-aggressive statement, but I still have trouble reading it as anything other than passive-aggressive snark, especially given the context of the conversation.

I find myself wishing I had a 'meh' flag for both your comment and my reply. Not quite a downvote or a report, but... "meh... this is not a useful addition to the conversation."

The downvote button is the "meh" flag! Why would you hesitate before downvoting such a comment? Slay evil instantly!

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