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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

I don't know anything about budgets, and Kat and Garry (and Sam!) will speak for YC, but here's how I see the HN part of your question.

To me, YC and HN are like the business and editorial sides of a newspaper. They're one company, but focused on different things. YC optimizes for great startups. HN optimizes for great content, that is, for curiosity. For HN to be "marketing for YC" would be like a newspaper's stories being "marketing for its advertisers". That would be a bad newspaper. Intellectual curiosity, the core value here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) would wither.

In other words, the way for HN to benefit YC is to just have the highest-quality content it can. That seems so obvious to me that I hope it is to everybody else too.

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>For HN to be "marketing for YC" would be like a newspaper's stories being "marketing for its advertisers". That would be a bad newspaper. //

Many (most?) newspapers have some stories that are very directly marketing for their advertisers - newspaper runs a story on bra-fittings and so sells advertising space to fashion companies.

In fact isn't this how newspapers work: they sell advertising. If the stories are "poor" (which characteristic is modified according to the target audience) then the paper doesn't sell and the advertiser gets fewer impressions. The paper promotes itself, wins pageviews and sell ads on the number of pageviews it's getting. Advertisers get impressions and the system feeds-back allowing the paper to grow, charge more and continue creating "news".

Isn't that exactly marketing for the advertisers?

Indeed looking at a NYT Magazine story at random I find not only regular advertising but the author's byline is also advertising a book. That makes me wonder if they're managing to sell much of the story space too.

In part I'd assumed that HN was created in order to provide buzz/feedback for YC companies and serve the purposes of YC (eg market information)? Indeed from the user perspective there's no way to know, with secret moderation, if any particular story has been "unfairly" promoted or quashed; just as with dead-tree publications.

What you describe isn't what I had in mind. I was thinking of the old-fashioned hard-boiled editor who says things like "over my dead body" and "give my regards to the President, but we won't be changing that story", and who offers his resignation on a regular basis. I hope they didn't just exist in movies - though you probably have to go back to the glory days of print journalism to find them.

You don't have to go that far back to find an editor who's willing to pay the symbolic price when it comes to influencing customers and advertisers by modifying press coverage.

Just last week, Ben Richardson, Bloomberg News' editor-at-large for Asia, resigned his post over Bloomberg management's pressure on their journalists to refrain from producing articles critical of China.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/world/asia/bloomberg-news-...

That's a great comparison - but I do empathise for the GP - Lord Beaverbrook, Rupert Murdoch, William Randolph Hearst all show that it's they guy at the top of a newspaper that makes the difference. We depend on pg to maintain that separation, and to agree with you, I am sure he will.

Maybe HN is just the pamphleteer equivalent - but we need to find new ways of gathering round the campfire and sharing stories - newspapers worked well for a while, what's coming next seems to have the HN shape - and still we rely on integrity in our leaders. In an age of the blockchain as the guardian of our trust, I find that interesting.

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