Part of what makes hackernews worth participating in is that the owners are not profit-maximizing and trying to extract the maximum possible value from the site.

It's a trade: y-combinator, by cultivating a group of talented technical contributors, gets to advertise hiring posts for free and, in some ways, autistically contributes to the community.

In exchange, we all get a place for thoughtful discussion with reasonably fair moderation.

It's a fair trade for those involved and closer to a non-profit model than Reddit which is clearly trying to extract as much value as possible from the content creators on their platform in exchange for giving them community/platform.