What’s the justification for spending money on this? So many more useful things to do than buy an expensive domain to redirect it here.
To be clear, it would be bad if HN had to split off from YC - bad for HN, bad for YC, bad for the community here. The feedback loops between HN and YC are complex, rich, and vital. So there's no plan ever to do that, but I still want the fallback just in case. I don't see why HN (and YC) shouldn't exist for a long time, and this is a long-time-frame sort of move.
In the meantime, it would be silly to let hackernews.com lie fallow, hence the redirection.
To be clear, it would be extremely good for the community if YC and HN were not the same company. The conflict of interest is stark and a violation of every tenet of journalism. I cant tell if you're purposely lying for the sake of profit motive or just very ignorant of the history and foundation of journalism.
I've never, ever before seen someone claim that a conflict of interest was "good for the community"!
There's certainly a conversation to be had about how we manage YC's interests vis-à-vis community interests—I've discussed that with many users over the years [1, 2], the principles have been well-established for a long time, and I'm always happy to explain more. But not on the basis of a giant non sequitur!
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
That's laughable, you don't get to redefine "news". It's right there in the name. If this place was honest, it would be called yc-announcements.com or something with transparency as to the goals of the site's owners.
You're really trying to dodge this, but again, it's cut and dry. Here I'll help you and any reader that actually want to learn about the media's responsibility to not hold conflicts of interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest#Media
Again, there is no excuse for this. You're arguing a point that's been well decided by people far brighter than those running this VC firm.
As for dodging, I've repeatedly unkilled your comments (which have been getting killed by one of HN's software filters) and replied. With dodges like that, who needs engagement? It has become repetitive, though, so if you'd like to continue the conversation, it would be good to say something new.
I stopped posting here because, dang, your moderation and preference for YC-positive narrative and companies was I thought excessive, especially compared to moderation on even Reddit. Your thread here with this poster, to be honest, belies to HN guidelines to "not feed the trolls." I have never seen a successful moderator troll other users so intensely. Please take a step back from the keyboard and think about why you feel the need to respond here, to "correct the record", to post "related threads" at the top of so many posts, etc etc. Whatever feedback you're getting today is clearly an echo chamber of YC energy. I won't even talk to YC start-ups now because of the bias you have personally shown.
As for moderating HN vis-à-vis YC - I've explained exactly what our approach is on countless occasions (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), including to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27685595.
You've repeatedly expressed that you don't like how we moderate HN and consider it inferior to your own practices as a moderator elsewhere. I'm sorry to hear that (and you may be right about the latter!), but your posts about these things have included several false statements as well as things that the bulk of the community just doesn't agree with you about. For example, when I post about related threads, that has nothing do with YC. I do it because readers like looking at links to past threads. It seems a strange thing to complain about.
And I have never really seen any indication of excessive "moderation and preference for YC-positive narrative". It should be unsurprising that his personal views are positive towards YC, but I see no problem with that as I have seen many people freely criticize YC, Paul Graham, and dang without being moderated away or kicked off the site (indeed, that is happening right here and now!)
If YC was going to take on the herculean task of trying to prove that their venture capital run message board was somehow not biased, they would need to really lean into transparency. As it is, they've done the exact opposite. I strongly disagree with dang that the general sentiment is that HN is unbiased, maybe amongst the faithful here people will say that (hoping someday to get some YC cash), but in the wider industry no one thinks HN is anything but YC's media outlet and the policies, features and moderator actions here back that up.
The onus is on the platform to prove that their conflict of interest isn't effecting the contents of the site, not on the audience to take their word on faith.
You can also read about people's preference for clean/relevant domains an example about hey.com