Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The genius is in the revenue model. It isn't hard, in theory, to build a website like HN (well, in practice it probably is - but not outside the top 10% of web coders). The tricky part is why should people like pg and dang sink so much time into growing the garden and keeping it pruned.

The hard part is to set up a situation where the website administrator benefits from having a large technocratic-oriented community that, as far as I can tell, loathes ads. And possibly images. Tough market to sell to.

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It’s also interesting to consider that with two (?) full time employees and a few servers you can support something like HN.

Compared to its reach, that’s surprisingly cheap.

And “hacker news” isn’t even the domain!

> The hard part is to set up a situation where the website administrator benefits from having a large technocratic-oriented community that, as far as I can tell, loathes ads. And possibly images. Tough market to sell to.

The market HN is selling itself to is misanthropic nerds who want to be the next Musk or Zuckerberg. The community's loathing of ads and images and the whole anti-modernist zeitgeist pays for itself in hacker "street cred" when someone's crazy idea makes a return on YC's investment.

Many online communities have financial value because they trade eyeballs for ad dollars. What is the financial value of a digital community like HN? Is there a way to estimate its worth in dollars?

Other than someone buying it for the prestige, I doubt that HN is worth much in itself. Other than email addresses, there is no data of value to mine that I can think of.

The only way to make money without digging the site's grave is to give a boost to posts advertising something. It has to be done infrequently and in a very subtle way so the users don't notice, and they will have a hard time finding advertisers without people finding out that they do it.

So yeah, I don't think its really worth it.

See, that’s really depressing to me. I think it brings financial value to Paul Graham but indirectly.

I've written in the past about how we tend to think about HN vis-à-vis YC's interests, if anyone wants to read about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

Beautiful. Thank you.

> (1) HN's only value to YC is the community; (2) the community only comes here to the extent that it finds HN interesting; (3) therefore, to optimize HN's value, we have to optimize it for being interesting. Moderating for parochial interest (e.g. suppressing things that some $ingroup doesn't like—VCs or whoever else) would make HN less interesting, so we don't. We also don't do it because (a) it would be wrong and (b) it would feel bad, but those concerns don't belong in a cynical argument. YC's business interests, however, do belong in such an argument, and it's very much in YC's business interest to keep this community as happy as possible. That's a sort of miracle if you think about it—a freak of economic nature—so we should all enjoy it for as long as possible.

I'm pretty sure Dan is doing this work because he loves it.

(It's been almost a decade since Graham was involved with HN.)

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