Why is Y Combinator so defensive lately? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Y Combinator so defensive lately?

techcrunch.com

68 pointsWisNorCan34 comments

I don’t understand why it’s not possible to downvote posts, I’d have saved someone else from killing his own braincells too by reading this article, instead I could not contribute to the mental health of a fellow specimen, sorry random stranger, not my fault

Flags downrank submissions and in that sense work like downvotes.

Normally we downweight articles like this but when YC or a YC startup is the story, we err on the side of moderating less - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

I read dang and thought I was being given another yellow card :look: thanks

I hate to disagree here Dan, but I tried revisiting this article a while back, and in spite of being posted only 8 hours ago, with a reasonable number of comments and up votes, the discussion was nowhere to be found in the first five pages of HN. That leaves me questioning if what you said actually takes place, or whether there is a mechanism for YC to make sure to sanitize the feed to their preference.

What you observed is so within the normal range of HN's functioning that there's a FAQ entry dedicated to it:

  Q: Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?

  A: You can't derive rank from votes and time alone. See "How are stories ranked?" above.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

In this case, the post dropped in rank because of user flags.

Understood. Is the flagging mechanism based on relative counts or absolute numbers? I think the latter mechanism would be extremely flawed.

I don't understand your question - can you put it differently?

So let's say we have a post with 110 upvotes and 40 comments, as well as 30 flags (i.e. 150 post interactions and 30 flagdowns, or a 1:5 ratio of flagdowns to interactions), and another with 27 upvotes, 13 comments and 20 flags (i.e. 40 post interactions with 20 flags, or a 1:2 ratio of flagdowns to interactions).

The second one is clearly more relatively flagged down than interacted with, even though it was flagged less. This could mean that the topic was clearly against the guidelines for glaring issues. On the other hand, the first could very likely be a controversial topic of discussion with clearly redlined sides (like the recent Jacobin mag article on men's health), or (unlikely but possible) that a swarm of company Z employees could have zealously flagged down the post because of its critical nature against company Z.

In an absolute flagging system, the first article would be flagged, by virtue of having the higher number of flags. In a relative flagging system, the second article would be flagged.

I assume that you hold final authority on which flagged posts actually get flagged and which stay. I hope it's not another decision that's been relegated to an algorithm in the background.

Ok, in those terms, HN's flagging system is relative, not absolute.

Given the option people downvote without reading quickly creating an Ecco chamber. There’s a flag function which serves a similar purpose but the extra effort lets a lot of more marginal content slip through.

You want more diverse content because it attracts a more interesting audience. There’s several mechanisms to promote this. “Health risks of travel in early-modern Britain” only has 35 upvotes in the last 6 hours but still ranks #17 because diversity is encouraged.

Another story is talking about remnants of a structure dating back “476,000 years and predating the evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens” https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2023/09/20/archaeologists-disco...

There both interesting but so is “Fine-grained caching strategies of dynamic queries” etc etc.

Yeah I think it won’t be against diversity, or it is not, just keep diversity within the boundaries of what the overall community would like, I mean, there is nothing about Kim Kardashian, because I suppose it would be too much diversity? Flagging I think helps to shape or better, contain, the diversity?

I don't think anyone cares about Kim Kardashian, except if she actually would have broken the Internet

Pretty sure it's an HN trope to read some of the comments before the article, in part to get a sense of the quality of the article.

So, your duty was done.

What is wrong with the article? It seemed to be a fairly normal piece, certainly not "braincell killing"

This could be a good feature if there's clear guidelines on what's off-topic or undesirable by some criteria. Seems more tricky than downvoting comments which works pretty well for keeping discourse civil as interests and what's interesting is very subjective. I do like systems that have a controverserial section if it doesn't attract content by its own nature.

If I ever run a successful business, I’m definitely going to have a “no posting about the business on social media” rule to avoid situations like this! I’m not sure who’s in the right or not, but reading through the tweets (almost) everyone involved ends up coming across as somewhat childish, which seems like a total lose-lose.

On one hand, the rule is good, on the other a loss for everyone else who enjoys influential figures demonstrating how petty and childish they are behind the layers of image crafting.

Exactly. Almost as much fun as when Garry wanted to take our money to keep him rich: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35118988

His (and others) comments and social media behavior during the SBV thing really opened my eyes.

What does this have to do with SVB?

You could hire a Chief Drama Officer

To be clear these are not random people inside the respective organizations. These are the CEOs of the organizations.

I trust that they had the judgment to decide that they needed to defend their reputation.

lol

well, Elon Musk who run the must successfully businesses on earth tweets all kinds of $hit and his businesses are going up and up.

Twitter has plummeted in value.

I know you're mostly correct but let's not distort reality here.

And there's a lot of evidence these business are excelling DESPITE him. Eg people buying Tesla even though they resent the man.

Right, it seems like with celebrities no press is bad press (with a couple exceptions) and Twitter feuds and drama bring more interest. But doing it on behalf of a company can only look bad.

The obvious example is Musk who regularly makes himself look like an idiot, though I think the kind of whiny defensive posts mentioned in this article look way worse.

Somewhat surprisingly, I think Yan LeCunn does a decent job of posting fairly aggressive tweets but not looking like a whiner, crazy or someone shouting pointlessly into the void.

To be fair, what sets YC apart from most, not all incubators, is the level of community communication: signal and support. Not every incubator has as much critical mass/network effects (yes, that cliche) of cleverness, hustle, intellect, and track record in one place. Sometimes, the relative difference can be as stark as comparing an Olympic training swimming center vs. the local middle school pool open during summer months: both can cool you off, but which will be more useful to an athlete?

Social media: The business utility of it is primarily in broadcasting press release-type information and real-time notices. For personal use, the power law distribution of popularity suggests it's a time suck with little or no net positive value.

I feel like I missed out on some major drama by not following these guys on X. Can someone explain this a little more, I feel as if I don't quite understand what the beef is just from reading the article.

As I understand it, the beef is that Neo compared themselves to YC claiming to be a better incubator because they have comparatively more mentors.

YCs contention is that the number of mentors on the website is not the right way to compare. For example, the YC mentors are working full time at YC helping startups while Neo’s mentors have full time jobs elsewhere and only spend a % of their time mentoring startups.

So the contention is that Neo is directly calling out YC and making dishonest comparisons.

There are other things as well about the ethics and behavior of the Neo founder, Ali Partovi, but it is only hinted at. Not explicitly stated with examples backing up any claims.

No, YC's contention is that the other organization made the (supposedly false) statement that "YC does not offer personalized advice". Which is not actually what he said at all, what he said was that they both have the same number of mentors but YC has significantly more startups.

I don't know whether those numbers are accurate or not because i don't know (or care) about either of these companies, but he definitely did not say what he's being accused of saying.

so the "slander" went both ways then?

Not clear that slander is in play here. Neo used a framing that made themselves look better and others look worse. YC refuted it. I am assuming YC has the receipts for broader insinuations.

"slander" was the word used by Gary Tan, the CEO of YC

https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1703121529683456286?s=20

Money and power make people do things they would likely regret otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com