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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

If the shareholders of ycombinator like your sentiment, you'll flourish. Ycombinator is a business don't forget. We're all here to discuss, usually in good faith. But I can't help but get the impression that submissions that are made popular are reviewed and measured, that's just my tinfoil hat maybe.

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I personally don't think YC the company has much to do with the dynamics of this site at all -- but many users here are likely fans of or aspiring participants in the program.

There is no shortage of comments and posts heavily critical of people associated with YC, though. Search comments for 'Gary Tan' and you'll see what I mean.

Agree. What I think the parent is observing is more the userbase collectively becoming an avatar for Silicon Valley talking points sometimes. It isn't always overt; it's more of a sense of disproportionately rewarding discussion points that mesh with the current zeitgeist (e.g. pro-AI posts doing better overall).

Only a minority of the userbase is in SFBA. There is no one consistent HN attitude towards any specific policy (I think it would be fair to say that there are HN styles of argumentation, though, not all of them good.)

Not involved with YC at all, but I wonder if they might promote the site to the applicants of their accelerator program and encourage them to sign up here.

If it helps at all, no, we don't do that.

Thanks for the info. (I've seen this at a university, that's where my suspicion came from)

> I personally don't think YC the company has much to do with the dynamics of this site at all

Why do you think they're not at least tied to help eachother?

The board of Ycombinator may not be here moderating but do you think they're independent?

If a submission becomes popular, more people see it. The more people see it the more people are likely to interact by upvoting, commenting, or flagging.

Stories can be popular because people agree with an agenda the story espouses/supports/furthers without the story being intellectually interesting in and of itself, deviating from well known presumptions or shedding new light. And even an intellectually interesting story can create more heat than light in the comments.

Everyone loves a dumpster fire a little bit now and there but unfortunately the internet standard is a tire fire.

> Ycombinator is a business don't forget.

Well yes. They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site with a business model of replacing recruiters for their companies, most of which are of interest to an average HN reader.

Let's be conservative and imagine that YC gets them both for a fully loaded total of only half a million per year. (Could be half that, could easily be twice that.) These two run the site and moderate it both. That's already damn impressive. Let's imagine hosting costs YC nothing, somehow. (Apparently it's only run on one machine.)

For the low low price of free you and I are getting a high performance site with astonishingly good moderation and relatively few ads, certainly none that beg for an ad blocker. Of course I expect it to comply with YC's needs but in fact there's an immense amount of criticism of YN and its cohorts.

Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum (I say that as a person with politics that probably run afoul of most HN readers).

Even with your tinfoil hat on I'm pretty sure you'll find nothing else remotely close to this good on the web for free.

> They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site

Well that's not the reality thankfully.

> Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum

I agree with you, but I'm biased towards this type of community where there is a real discussion, I've been proven wrong many times here and it never felt personal.

I only put my tinfoil hat o because when something is free these days, it's usually you as the product. I'd never want to lose the community but back in my day there was IRC servers with packed channels, there was Usenet. These days it's a rarity instead of the norm. Maybe I'm just getting too old.

> I only put my tinfoil hat o because when something is free these days, it's usually you as the product

Sometimes, but that's not the case. I think most Open source is an example of that.

There are also many mastodon /lemmy / matrix instances and so many other niche things which run on donations and I guess some of them don't mind chipping in some of their money for the idea of a better internet if that interests them as well.

Sorry if it got off topic but just because something is free doesn't mean you are the product, you can be usually right, but I don't think HN is nearly close to this (it depends) and I feel so thankful to such products/services for existing in a world of making me the product. I just want to say thanks to those services where its free and you aren't the product and they run on donations, we people really need to chip in more in those donations as well for a better more decentralized internet

Usenet was great early on, but near the time of its acquisition it was suffering from the same problems we see now on all social media sites: trolls, objectionable content, power-hungry mods, the works.

All these problems are writ much larger now because the net is like a million times as popular as back then. No social media site can survive on free moderators and without membership fees unless the rent gets paid somehow.

I assert HN requires less "rent" from us users than any other equally successful social media site.

What "acquisition"? Nobody owns Usenet, it's a cooperative effort between many different server operators which continues to this day.

Yeah, but you can also browse /new with dead unhidden. I'd say they doing a favor moderating more often than not. But there is of course an intuitive bias. They are a business after all.

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