alt Hacker NewsI don't think that's true. It's not that has zero value, it's that it has zero monetizable value.
Hackernews is free. The posts are valuable to me and I guess my posts are valuable to me, but I wouldn't pay for it and I definitely don't expect to get paid.
For YC, you are producing content that is "valuable" that brings people to their site, which they monetize through people signing up for their program. They do this with no regard for what your preferences are when they choose companies to invest in.
They sell ads (Launch, Hire, etc.) against the attention that you create. You ARE the product on HackerNews, and you're OK with it. As am I.
Same as OpenAI, I dont need to monetize them training on my data, and I am happy for you to as I would like to use the services for free.
>Hackernews is free. The posts are valuable to me and I guess my posts are valuable to me, but I wouldn't pay for it and I definitely don't expect to get paid.
at this point, we may need future forums to be premium so we can avoid the deluge of AI bots plauging the internet. a small, one time cost is a guaranteed way to make such strategies untenable. SomethingAwful had a point decades ago.
But like any other business, you need to follow the money and understand the incentives. Hackernews has ads, but ads for companies with us as the audience. It's also indirectly an ad for YCombinator itself as bringing awareness of the accelerator (note what "hackernews.com" redirects to).
I'm fine with a company advertising itself; if I wasn't the idea of a company ceases to really function. And in this structure for companies, I can also get benefits by potentially getting jobs from here. So I don't mind that either. Everything aligns. I agree and support the structure. I can't say that about many other "free" websites.
As for me. I do want to monetize my data one day. I can't stop the scraping the entire internet over (that's for the courts), but I sure as heck won't hand it to them on a silver platter.