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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

What about HN? What about make-firefox-private-again.com? Go through the HN frontpage and the links. Thats why i'm sure you are wrong.

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> What about HN?

The same HN that is heavily moderated by a paid employee and paid for by a multi-billion dollars net worth company called YCombinator?

Y Combinator will continue to exist in a post-attention-economy world. They have proven themselves to be quite adaptable.

> Y Combinator will continue to exist in a post-attention-economy world. They have proven themselves to be quite adaptable.

That's not the question. Hacker News was used as an example of an old-school site that worked without monetisation. Which is clearly not the case.

Surely HN doesn't require the existence of YC as a startup accelerator to exist, right? HN has to me survived because of its community and shared values wrt discussion. The moderation probably plays a role in it, but that's also easily decoupled from big money.

> The moderation probably plays a role in it, but that's also easily decoupled from big money.

Do you believe that users are going to pay to get access to HN?

No, but I also believe that it's not so expensive that someone couldn't cover it if it was their hobby. This is doubly true if it's something like HN where it's not trying to scale to infinity.

If it weren't for YC and the network effect of of SV startup culture (remember it started as "Startup News"), HN would be just another niche forum from which most people would have migrated to Reddit ages ago. It might still exist, but only as a withered shell of its former self.

The only reason HN still persists at the scale that it does is precisely because of its association with YC and "tech bros," because the billion dollar venture capital firm running it has made it a part of their identity.

You used the word monetization, everyone else in this subthread is talking about advertising. HN is funded as a piece of content marketing for a startup accelerator.

I suppose you could call the Launch HN threads ads, but only just, and they're of the absolute least objectionable sort—on topic, clearly labeled, unobtrusive, first party, with no tracking.

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