Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

That strikes me as unfair on two counts, one, its not brazen, at least by any standards I know of. HN is hardly a rolling advert for HN companies.

Secondly, and more importantly, we are all about using algorithms to automate and take care of peskiness.

I applaud people who do that in nearly all circumstances.

View on HN

I meant that he's trying to hide HN's real intention, publicity for YCers - their job ads and blog posts are on front page but no one else is allowed, and if anyone else's story gets up there it's dealt with by his algos. Algo's are good, but his algos are specifically designed to promote his content while not revealing that.

Google has a strict policy of separating ads and organic, "do no evil". PG doesn't adhere to that. He even openly boasts about how he tricked his investors back in the day by having random people show up on meeting days, and encourages this type of behaviour in YCers - all the while expounding he doesn't like a-holes. Couple that with his decidedly evil hellbanning policy, he needs to do some serious soul-searching.

Why not start your own similar message board? I'm not just being glib. You know HN is based reddit's free software, right? I would love to see more competition and more variants of moderation policies. I've watched reddit's and slashdot's both evolve in interesting ways. I've run phpBB forums and ended them quickly b/c of the load of moderating. I've been on usenet groups with extremely high signal to noise ratio. I've got many more ideas on how to solve the problem of optimizing signal to noise, so I know many more people must have them. I say, GO FOR IT!

I'll get to it right after I start my own OS because Microsoft's too evil and my own superpower country because the military-industrial complex is too evil.

lobste.rs seems like a good alternative, but you need a referral from a member to get in. Still worth browsing in read-only mode but it lacks any real discussions. [The sum of the comment count for all front-page articles on there is 15, though most of the links are less than a day old and the oldest is 4 days.]

I would like some citations here - Yes there is a whole job posting section solely for YC'ers. But thats pretty clearly sign-posted. And AFAIK, the only way a post there makes it to the front page is if it is voted up. And they are clearly marked 'cos you cannot comment on them, so everyone ignores them unless its for a cool company.

Do those posts get to go higher on less votes? I don't know but some proof would be nice before I agree.

And while its in context re: Google, as a personal bugbear, please reserve the word evil for events in Syria, and the like. Message boards don't come within spitting distance of evil.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com