Ask HN: Origins of Hacker News
I always wondered how Hackernews came to be and how they built this community up. Where did all the users come from initially?
Most people found them and discussed them on Slashdot, I think - certainly I first read How to Start a Startup (http://paulgraham.com/start.html) after my friend/co-founder found it on Slashdot.
A few months after How to Start a Startup was published, the first batch of Y Combinator was convened - http://paulgraham.com/sfp.html
It went so well that they ran it again that winter, then kept running it twice a year.
One of the startups in that first batch was Reddit.
There's some story about pg wanting the Reddit founders to make a subreddit for talking about startups/tech to be a community for people interested in YC, but for some reason it didn't happen the way he wanted so he decided to build his own forum, initially called Startup News (https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html), then soon after became Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.
The objective of Startup News/Hacker News was twofold - as real-world use-case for the Arc programming language he was creating, and to be a place where people interested in startups/tech could come to read interesting articles and discuss interesting topics, and then maybe eventually become interested enough in startups to apply to Y Combinator.
Some more detail here:
https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-ne...
There was a /startups or similar channel on reddit, one of the first YC companies, and they managed to attract people over here.