Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsc1986 | Hacker News Reader

jsc1986

Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?

The point is not that they have direct control over YC or HN, it's that they have massive indirect control over the organization and have done a wizard's job of making themselves untouchable in the media.

Some context: I'm a former (early) YC founder, and during my batch the YC team recommended that we spend time with the HN team. The HN team gave us edits on our posts, recommended the best times of day to submit, emailed us when stories about our companies hit the front page, and explained how the ranking algorithms worked (and thus we learned how to game them). And we are not the most valuable YC company ever -- so it's possible more was done for Stripe.

It's not direct influence, but rather indirect impact. So again I ask -- Did Patrick request that you write this post?

View on HN

That sounds weird to me. There was no "HN team" before I started working on HN in October 2012 - just pg, and no one would have referred to him as "the HN team".

The HN team originates in April 2014, when I became public as a mod. (That's not early in YC btw.) In that case you're talking about me (and possibly Scott), and while I guess it's dangerous to make strong claims about some meeting I don't remember, there's no way we would have "explained how the ranking algorithms worked" in such a way that you could game HN. That's precisely what we would not have done. I've worked way too hard on that shit to blab about it and see all that sand run through my fingers.

I also doubt that we'd have told you "the best times of day to submit"—people ask us that all the time and the stock answer is we have no idea, there are all sorts of dodgy analyses out there, and you can take your pick.

As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, yes—I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.

Perhaps it was just our batch, but there was a long discussion about how the algo worked amongst founders. Admittedly, you + Scott were not there. Some partners were and the discussion was seeded by them, but I don't remember how much they contributed vs. others in the group.

Edit: Apologies if this came off as accusatory. Was trying to make the point that they don't have control of the media, but instead are just flawless in their use of it.

In that case it was the blind leading the blind. The advice that founders give each other about how to game HN routinely backfires. Unfortunately, people are so conditioned to conflate "feels like it should work" with "actually works", that no matter how much we repeat the contrary it seems to have little effect.

Thanks for the reply - you had me wondering for a minute what the hell I wasn't remembering.

> Unfortunately, people are so conditioned to conflate "feels like it should work" with "actually works", that no matter how much we repeat the contrary it seems to have little effect.

Thank you for this. This sentiment applies to so much online, especially in the field of online content, social media posting and conversion rates.

What feels like it should work is not the same as what actually works.

This site was posted on here at some point and it made me mad because everything the guy recommends sounds awesome, but where is any proof that it actually improves sales? https://examples.roastmylandingpage.com/

Humans are complex beasts and sometimes the exact opposite of the obvious is the right solution: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-11573666

This is interesting. I have not done a launch or a Show HN post in some time but back in the day HN was pretty easy to game: three rapid upvotes from unrelated accounts and IPs got you to the bottom of the front page (I did not use sock puppets ever, instead just asking geographically diverse friends to upvote the post immediately after posting it). If the content was mildly interesting you got to see it spend some time at the top. Posting when the New page had a longer delta T between the top and bottom post was also helpful. I definitely got a lot of front page time for what I now consider fairly mediocre content.

Voting rings aren't allowed any more than sock puppets are.

That's not really the "HN team," though. What you're describing that the partners did is scummy, but makes sense when you realize that partners and dang have effectively an adversarial relationship when it comes to the quality of HN. People invested in you have strong reason to try and ensure your popularity here; they very well could have just tried throwing tips at you to get you to manipulate the site better.

Most people can't stare at the News source for an hour straight without getting a headache, let alone a rich investor type. They wouldn't find much of value in what's been publicly released of it, anyway (the released source is ancient and includes little as far as quality control goes).

If what you're saying is based in truth, you were probably just getting tips from someone with a strong financial incentive to have brute forced their way into understanding the site the manual way (throwing posts at it) rather than someone who had any genuine inside knowledge.

I can confirm that dang is a massive help to non-YC founders posting on HN.

He’s helped me a couple of times to make my posts more appealing to readers, providing great insight into what HN readers are looking for.

Same here.

I launched a company that has grown into a mild success because of dang giving it another chance and it making the front page.

Me too -- dang has given me valuable feedback about what kinds of things to post, and how to focus and frame posts so people will find them useful and interesting, how to save and respect people's time, and how not to overwhelm or tire people out so much. Much of that advice applies to writing and life in general, not just posting to HN! And he's even done kind favors like correcting an embarrassing typo I made in quote of a transcript that accidentally inverted the meaning of what the person was trying to say, when I only noticed it after the paint dried.

+1000 same here

dang rules

> As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.

Fact: dang's helped me a few times with this when I've goofed with my own comments, and as best as I can tell, I'm not a founder of any kind.

dang offered me to do the same thing for my, now closed, start-up.

that only makes it more likely they're helping more important people more frequently and to a greater degree.

By that logic, there's really nothing generous dang can do that isn't further proof of his perfidy.

Indeed once you understand that the moderators are helping people with brand management and suggestions at the very least, and the extent to which this occurs is hidden, they lose the ability to claim neutrality and open themselves up to lots of questions about what else they're doing

That's a result of actions taken not some kind of theoretical argument.

> open themselves up to lots of questions about what else they are doing

Is there a name for this pattern?

1. Observe that a human is taking some action to more effectively do their jobs… but in a way that has some risk of being unevenly applied or also self-beneficial.

2. Conclude that this action is itself malfeasance.

3. Conclude that this person merits generalized distrust.

I see this all the time in comments on (for example) youtube. I struggle to see how social cohesion could survive in a world where more people do this: If you lose trust by doing your job well, then its harder to motivate yourself to maintain others’ trust that you’ll do your job.

It depends what you think their job is I guess. I never imagined that forum moderation would include helping brand management for forum users - in fact I'd say those two behaviours are in direct conflict with each other.

If your job is forum moderation and you do that well great. But if the same people use those same accesses to give some forum users help over other forum users without any transparency then there is no illusion of neutral moderation and this whole forum just may be undisclosed pr/ brand management whole people are discussing companies/jobs/tech in a way that might bias others.

I haven't read anything on the site providing brand management to some users. Was that disclosed somewhere? How could you trust any post talking about a new company or having to do with companies in general if some are getting assistance to boost their reception and others aren't?

I think their job is maintaining the health and ambient trust within the social system that is HN -- keeping HN a place people generally want to keep coming back to for thoughtful conversation. Assuming thats reasonably close, lets look at the activities we're talking about:

> As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.

So there are two categories:

1. Helping clarify each others messages.

2. Letting people know when something is happening that concerns them.

Why do they not disclose this? Suppose you have two friends Alice and Bob. Suppose Alice tells you that about something Bob said which really upset her. Would you:

A. Commiserate with Alice by telling her about something ambiguously untrustworthy that Bob said.

B. Reply to Alice by comparing Bob unfavourably to Frank.

C. Listen empathetically to Alice and then when she's vented, offer another more charitable interpretation of Bob's words.

D. Later, let Bob know that Alice is upset with him and he might want to chat with her.

I bet most folks would advocate options C and D. Yet that is is basically doing "undisclosed pr/brand management" on behalf of Bob. It is pretty much the same as what dang says he does for HN. I don't think HN discloses this for the same reason that they don't disclose a habit of holding doors open for people -- I assume they don't remark on it because it seems unremarkable to them.

----------------------------------------

Your words like "neutral", "give some forum users help over other forum users" imply a strict duty to avoid cooperative behaviour in favour of competitive behaviour. I don't think that duty is nearly so strict.

I never imagined

This is probably the crux of the problem, the scenario you're describing is based mostly on assumptions of your own - like 'brand management' (whatever that is) and 'secret'. See for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29231229

As with any online thing made mostly of people, there are lot of not entirely obvious things about HN, both good and bad. It's not the Brand Management (whatever that is) Shadow Council you seem convinced it is.

> I never imagined that forum moderation would include helping brand management for forum users

Me neither. That sounds like hell!

> Is there a name for this pattern?

What about "assume bad intentions"?

> Is there a name for this pattern?

See “Fundamental Attribution Error”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

There are wheels within wheels in this village, and fires within fires! When Reverend Hale comes, you will proceed to look for signs of witchcraft here.

You mean he ought to spend his limited time picking random comments from unimportant people that noone wants to read and help edit those comments, so that the world becomes more fair and just?

Sounds like a recipe for a successful forum.

FWIW dang was extremely helpful when I had an issue. He worked with me to resolve it, rather than take arbitrary executive action. I don’t credit any accusation of dang playing favourites to YC founders. Basically, there is no level of assistance higher than what I received, therefore there is no way someone is getting preferential treatment. There’s simply no more that could’ve been done.

Note: I wasn’t completely happy with the outcome at the time, but I respected the decision. I hindsight I agree with it too.

I'm also a YC founder of a (smaller, but top ~100 in terms of valuation) YC company. I don't know what your experience was like with Stripe, but the notion that Patrick has some unduly amount of power to exercise over HN and YC immediately flags to me as untrue. I've been on the receiving end of a lot of HN criticism, and I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.

Edits on your posts, recommending the best times of day to submit, explaining how HN algorithms work broadly, are accessible to everyone; these are discussed frequently on HN, and were all accessible to me even before I was a YC founder. I'm also certain the HN team wouldn't need to email Patrick about something like this being on the front page; when my company (~150 employees) is on the front page I get a bunch of messages about it from all sorts of different angles; certainly many of the thousands of Stripe employees use HN and would be capable of sending a Slack or text.

To me it seems the notion that Patrick has "indirect control" over parts of HN is a longer way of saying he has respect. I think Patrick may be the most universally respected founder in Silicon Valley, and perhaps doubly so amongst engineers. I am not surprised at all that people upvote his comments, as he's both the person speaking from authority, and they're usually well reasoned - I use them as a model for how to respond well (something I have not always done).

I'm not saying you're being untrue about your experience (and I don't think OP was being untrue about theirs), but the notion that Patrick as at the helm of an evil empire stealing from companies and manipulating folks to keep it quiet just feels farcically different from reality across the dozens of Stripe and YC/HN touch points I have.

> I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.

Consider [1] which was flagged dead. It was ~10 years ago, so I could be wrong, but I believe there was a follow-up meta "Ask HN" where someone asked why it was flagged (I can't find it), and I __believe__ PG said something along the lines that he didn't find the original constructive, hence flagging it dead. Top comment on the non-constructive OP was from spolsky with some insightful information on job postings...

Definitely seemed like going above and beyond to tip the scale in YC founder's favor.

Edit: found the followup/meta [2] (I was wrong, no official explanation was given, sorry about that).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2703771

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2707385

I think hn moderation has probably changed in the last 10 years. For one thing, the set of moderators has entirely changed since then.

> I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.

This [0] story criticising Gitlab resurfaced on a day of Gitlab IPO and quickly disappeared from the frontpage within an hour or so.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28857073

I'm assuming this occurred because HN's "flame detector" triggered (Think it has something to do with upvotes vs comments).

I think you might be getting conspiratorial about this. Here's my take on reading the comment thread. I am an outsider peering in - no connection to the companies etc.

1. Your single experience doesn't represent a pattern of behavior - and dang comment's certainly corrected some of your original inaccuracies in your comments. If you can attribute many cases of this happening then maybe it represents a pattern of behavior.

2. Patrick might have different relationships depending where you are on the power curve of importance to them (competitor, investor, partner, etc) - which could explain the discrepancy between your experience + barmstrong. There are also a host of other possibilities.

3. In terms of barmstrong's positive comments does he have an investment in square either personally or through his company, any partnership with the organization, or is personally friends with Patrick. Any of those would bias his comments in favor. He might have a great relationship with Patrick.

At the end of the day - I'm not sure where this goes. It comes across like a strong personal attack from a bad situation that is getting a lot of response on HN.

No he did not. We didn’t even discuss it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com