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?
> (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.
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.