Y Combinator’s Hacker News Advantage

fernstrategy.com

4 pointsmjfern2 comments

"why do Paul Graham and YC continue investing their time and resources on this news site?"

A hacker wouldn't find this such a mystery. Once you build something that has users, it's hard to shut it down.

(I'm not denying HN has benefits for YC. But if for example there is some sort of bug that's breaking the site, loss of benefits to YC is pretty far down my list of motivations for fixing it.)

Paul, Thanks very much for the comment. I wasn't suggesting that these advantages are the only reason why YC invests in HN. But these benefits are important enough to justify investment, even if we ignore the significant social benefits in bringing together hackers and founders.

By the way, I'd be very curious to know if you anticipated any of these benefits when you first launched HN or if HN was just an experiment (with using Arc), and these benefits emerged over time through serendipity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com