Conde Nast did own it at some point, then it was transferred out and Conde Nast's parent is the majority owner (or was? the news report above only lists them as one investor).
I don't know how Hacker News manages to stay so pure, given that it's run by venture capitalists, yet still remains free of ads and open to newcomers. Monetising CS is like demanding a signup fee to join HN: it will drastically change the community.
Hacker News is smaller than most major subreddits in terms of usage. 400 upvotes is considered a lot here. The site is extremely simple and something that could be replicated in a couple of days at most by most engineers. It doesn't process money or really require a lot of content moderation either.
Ehh there's a really pro ycombinator slant and ever notice how any yc announcement, hiring notice, or article quickly hits the top? They're getting a lot of value out of that stuff that helps with the VC side of things.
HN makes no secret out of that. Reddir has Tencent's influence crippling them.
The fact that YC doesn't need to monetize HN , and others mentioned how so much talented is sourced here is what makes it a good and comfortable place for technologists and tech enthusiasts.
Although, I am still a wee bit dissappointed at the lack of discussion about actual hacking.
Sure, but the criticisms mostly don't apply to companies in the seed stage. YC is somewhat removed from the mainstream critiques of startups mostly by sitting at the part of the process where startups are most startup-like, ironically enough.
You’re not wrong, but we’re talking about different things. Culturally YC is more associated with startup culture, even if their direct involvement ends after the seed stage.
Keep in mind that YC is very visible. As a result, complaints about VC behavior in general will accumulate to YC, since they’re often the public face of startups and startup culture. That might not be fair or ever correct, but it’s how people work.
Personally, YC’s involvement in AirBnB is my biggest complaint with the company. I’m not sure how it looked from the inside before hand, but in retrospect AirBnB is one of the poster children of VC backed companies extracting profits at the cost of society, and I suspect that they probably should’ve known better.
I'm sorry for the lack of clarity. I should have been explicit in saying, I agree that treating society as a thing you can vacuum wealth out of is a bad thing; the people who run a VC firm (and who view unions as an indicator for industries to "disrupt") may view that as a good thing, or as the goal.
That should tell you something important about them.
That’s focusing on AirBnB’s effect on the hotel industry, but I’m more concerned about AirBnB’s effect on the rent market. This is a subject that’s been pretty well covered here before.
I absolutely read your link, it was talking about hotel consumers. But I was never concerned about hotel consumers; I was concerned about the effects on everyone else.
Studies into various markets have shown that AirBnB increases rent for residents by converting long term rentals to short term rentals, reducing housing supply. The question is whether or not the increased tourism offsets the damage caused to the housing market. Studies point towards the answer being “no”.
This is not an out there theory on my part; the name for this is the “AirBnB effect”, and searching for that shows articles in Forbes, EPI (linked), the Guardian, The Harvard Business Review, among others.
You absolutely did not, because it very clearly states it's not just about hotel consumers: It's about the welfare effects on hotels, travelers (including those who otherwise wouldn't have been hotel consumers), and hosts [1]. Why do you keep mischaracterizing it?
The EPI thinktank report you linked to simply states the costs outweigh the benefits without any numbers to support that conclusion. This paper, on the other hand, does look at the numbers. I appreciate the reference, however.
Any of the non-founder employees who work at one of their hundreds of portfolio companies that have refused to go public. Literally only one company backed by YC, Dropbox, has gone public to date.
My comment was in response to "Who would hate on YCombinator." To expand on my answer: All of the employees who were duped into taking a low salary in exchange for the promise of valuable equity are the ones who would hate on YC.
Haven’t you noticed the years long media campaign to try and get the public to hate tech? It hasn’t been very successful but it’s not like there aren’t a lot of people who hate every single person who work in the technology industry.
There are very few billionaire charity projects that don't have some kind of bait stench associated with them...
This site is a lot less brazen that, say the Gates Foundation or Jack Dorseys "all the strings attached" charity "donations", but there's no doubt it's run in the interests of YC and they're doing it for the benefits they get.
Not that I begrudge them that. It just needs to be something you bear in mind when wondering about odd looking article rankings or apparent voting/submission patterns that evade the fraud detection... It's their space, they can do that if they want. I (and everyone else) needs to weight up the benefit to themselves against the benefit to the people in control, and determine whether to hang around here, or walk away. For me? They do an OK job of not taking too m much advantage of their ultimate power here. I'm mostly cool with them.
> The site is extremely simple and something that could be replicated in a couple of days at most by most engineers.
I'm a little skeptical of this. Don't get me wrong, I understand that it's not going to win any ACM awards for innovation in web development - it's a simple web app. I know this. But I think it's well beyond the 2-day prototype mark.
Because I know what a cheapo off-the-shelf, 2-day-product or PHP forum feels like, and Hacker News doesn't feel like that. It's a little more fine-grained and thoughtful than that.
The design, and probably countless little feature improvements that take time to make: I think these have accreted over time, a tiny bit at a time. And for what it's worth, getting comments to nest (stored in DB, parent, child, child of child etc.) and then to show that correctly in the UI isn't quite as easy as people who haven't attempted it might think.
And then things like downvoted comments being faded, next page loading at screen bottom, setting up the API... it all adds up.
Sure, but a mvp that does 75% of it is definitely possible in a weekend for a pair of really good in-the-zone coders. I'd argue that if you actually list out all these minor features fully, it's even possible to flesh it out completely in 4-5 very long days. Even otherwise, this could easily be a site that starts with a full weekend of work for mvp, followed by gradual refininig over the next few months with feedback needing no more than a Saturday afternoon. I wouldn't even consider myself the best coder out there and I have definitely coded something in a similar timeline in the past - a Netflix style book lending website with queues, inventories, user auth, the whole shebang. Im sure it wouldn't work in the same scale as HN, but I doubt it would have been that hard to keep up.
As I typed this I realized how unsubstantiated this claim looks, and to be frank the cost of just doing this isn't even that high, so I'm probably just going to do this next weekend for giggles. Let's see!
I've been following Netflix for really long, and whatever downgrade in their UX is absolutely deliberate on their part to hide their library's flaws.
If you really wish to go back to the original view, you should consider giving Netflix dvd a try. You get DVDs and on top of it the original site with five star ratings, predicted rating and most importantly the ability to sort by predicted rating in any genre!
HN is run as a side gig, modded by iirc 2 or 3 staffers. Simple tech stack with next to zero new features, so not too capital intensive.
Plus: there are a shitload of people from all over the world here, ranging from broke devs in "third world countries" over German journalists to US VC CEOs. HN is essentially a gateway to a lot of influential people... a "soft power" in politics terms. And one with real monetary value as HN is an excellent place for new YC companies to get users, staff, or a network. An advantage that other VC funds do not have.
> I don't know how Hacker News manages to stay so pure
It's heavily moderated, more so than Reddit. Right now is an interesting time because COVID posts are weighted to quickly fall off the front page (I'm not really complaining, this is a tech link site and I can see how those get annoying; no one wants to think about that right now, but if you see one of those threads, they are some of the most interesting and controversial, so check them out before they fall off).
> COVID posts are weighted to quickly fall off the front page (I'm not really complaining, this is a tech link site and I can see how those get annoying
Agreed. There is no shortage of COVID coverage, like, everywhere so I'm glad that they slide away quickly.
That said, I do appreciate the hard looks the HN crowd takes on some of the posted studies.
1. Moderation, by thoughtful paid moderators. In particular I think the style of moderation is pretty good here
2. Light curation (pushing posts that aren’t a “good fit” down the rankings; asking people to resubmit good submissions that flopped)
3. I feel like it’s changed quite a lot in the last 10 years or so I’ve been reading the site. The popular topics have changed. I see fewer of some kinds of stupid comment and more of other kinds of stupid comment. But it’s hard to describe what the changes are.
HN is maybe the only social network that is actually for socializing and networking. It’s also the only one that has figured out a way to monetize a network of people that doesn’t involve counting eyeballs and clicks.
Networks are so valuable and important to success it’s actually kind of crazy that surveillance and advertising is the only strategy most social networks have been able to come up with so far.
I've never socialized neither networked here, but I've learned a ton thanks to the quality of the discussion. It taught me a lot about the importance of moderation, and rules in general.
The network HN grows isn’t yours, it’s YC’s. It grows their network of applicants and helps their network of funded companies reach new audiences of users and high quality technical employees via things like Launch HN and the featured hiring posts.
And I’d call a comment a form of socializing. Who knows? A maybe one of your comments here put the seed in someone’s head to launch a new startup. That seems like the kind of socializing YC would be interested in fostering to me.
if you really don't know, you may want to delve more deeply into the value of HN for said venture capitalists--it's not to make a few bucks on the side. think about the community and who they need in the companies they fund.
Reddit is backed by venture capital and shifted heavily to be more advertiser friendly.