Ask HN: does submission and comment quality spike near YC application time?

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IIRC, its been made clear that ones HN history can figure into a YC app so I was curious about the impact of that on conversation quality here.

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My impression is that HN's quality declines during the application window. I suspect that this is because people more closely coupled to YC are more likely to be busy and that these people overlap the set of people who influence HN's quality to some degree. In the past demo day has also been noticeable to me.

I'd never really considered that applicants fishing for karma might also have an effect. But my gut would suggest that people under stress and trying to impress might not improve quality either.

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