As it relates to HN, PG what have you learned from the users? If HN was a startup, would it make it into YC?
To me it appears that the users of HN and the users of YC have slowly become a disjoint set. I felt it used to be more of an internal message board where founders interacted, and outsiders were welcome. It is now more of a publishing media outlet, with few founder cross-interactions.
You might as well ask about other groups of users PG is — or was — associated with.
HN turned out to be a side-track, and PG hasn’t posted here for two years https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg — the last time he really interacted was when he posted about his hobby project, bel.
> If HN was a startup, would it make it into YC?
It would lose it’s HNness, become more social media. It could monetise by political influence, rather than advertising dollars.
Disclaimer: my own opinions. No idea what PG thinks.
As for the decline of HN, having been around HN long, long time, in my opinion there’s no real pattern, or at least there’s massive amount of randomness that people tend to read into. If you’re interested in interacting with founders on HN, very easy to do, if you’re intentional about it.
As for if HN was focused on growth, would it change? - Maybe, though I would like to hope that would be a net positive, not negative.
PS - In case you missed it, posted the comment by PG related to HN here:
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>> Here's a little known fact about the history of Y Combinator. The single biggest source of stress, for me at least, was not picking startups or advising them or Demo Day or even fighting with people on the startups' behalf. It was running HN.
>> Don't start a forum.
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Above was posted to Twitter Jul 11, 2020 — please see link below for additional context:
It may be precisely because of a tendency to understand and improve, that it is a mental sinkhole.