Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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