Entertainment value is the only thing that makes HN valuable to YC. Admitting that to yourself is important; I wasn’t able to set aside my feelings of “the community is gone” until realizing that it’s just a different kind of community. One that seeks a certain flavor of entertainment.

You keep coming back because HN makes you feel good. It’s both as simple and as complex as that.

EDIT: This topic is much more nuanced than my comment here. Entertainment doesn’t imply that it’s somehow a lesser endeavor. But if Dan stopped entertaining the community, it would fall apart. It’s a necessary step in order to get to the most gratifying aspects of HN, and it’s why incendiary topics are so tricky.

I think most people would agree that Reddit is less entertaining than HN. Entertainment doesn’t mean cheesy. I wouldn’t find most political discussions very entertaining, whereas someone explaining how they hunted down a subtle bug is one of the most entertaining types of comments.

The best commenters here “play for the audience” the same way street performers play for the crowd. It’s all about skill. And if it’s skill-based rather than something random, you’ll have to admit that there’s a target to aim for.

That target is “be entertaining.” It’s called intellectual gratification in the rules, but fundamentally, you come to HN instead of Reddit because you’re entertained here, not there.

It’s my job to write substantive comments here. And it’s one I do happily, because I get so much out of it in return. But I have to be keenly aware of whether you, the audience, are getting something out of it too. That’s the essence of being entertaining.

My point here was that TikTok is gratifying in addition to “entertaining,” in many of the same ways that HN is. This was shocking, since I was expecting something horrible when I tried it out. It’s quite the opposite; you just have to look past the horrors for the gems.

Think of it like being trapped on https://news.ycombinator.com/newest, except sometimes you get the front page, and occasionally you get /highlights. You’d think you were alternating between something apocalyptic, something great, and something astounding.

TikTok’s algorithm achieves that, somehow. I’ve curated almost 3,000 videos. Actually, I just checked: 4,644.

As an accomplished contributor to ML and a long time community member, trust me when I say that I wouldn’t do it unless there was something valuable there. I’d lose interest, just as you would in Reddit’s /r/politics.