> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies

I should probably clarify this a bit.

It's true that HN sponsors Launch HNs (and Show HNs) by YC startups. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. However, YC would not be funding HN if that were the only reason for it. It's a secondary factor.

Far more important than promoting existing startups is attracting founders who might start new startups. This requires an entirely different strategy than promotion: it requires being interesting enough to attract the right kind of users. That's why the site is organized around curiosity, as I explained elsewhere in the current thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46309399).

For more on this, here are past explanations:

optimizing for curiosity - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

relationship between HN and YC's business interests - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies. So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.

Everything has a cost. For the web, that's typically monetary or your data and attention to advertisers. I think you're right that the cost of Hacker News is that my participation is lending some (tiny incremental) legitimacy to Y Combinator. It's also costing some tiny amount of my attention, in the sense that I may not have heard of Y Combinator if it weren't for Hacker News. For me personally, that is absolutely fine – but I'm glad you made it explicit so that it's a conscious choice.

[Edit: Of course it costs an absolutely vast amount of my attention :-) but I mean only a teeny tiny fraction of that is "payment" in the sense of noticing that Y Combinator exists.]

> Hacker news is there to promote ycombinator companies.

That's up to you, really, you can just ignore them. I know I do.

> So long as you know and avoid this it's surprisingly high quality. But that's there to lend more ligitimacy to ycombinator.

Probably, or maybe that is just an overly cynical take. If it were as bad as that I can think of a couple of very easy things they could do to improve on that and they aren't so for now I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Note that I'm not particularly impressed by anybody associated with YC except the mods here.

> Its also the last man standing in the continual growth and death of tech sites - Slashdot, digg, reddit - and the most surprising one to make it big.

So you're saying there is hope for Haskell?

> You know a tech site is useful when you write about a bug and the maintainer comes out of the woodwork to fix it, something that I've seen happen in the last week on nh for the first time.

There are some pretty funny instances of such interaction here, the best of which still has me in stitches after more than a decade.

Reddit is significantly more popular/successful than HN even for tech.

HN is its own little world and that’s fine.

Theres 3 (4?) horse men of online communities.

1 Identity topics, eg: Politics/Religion

2 Insufficient moderation

3 NSFW content

4 Inability to distinguish experienced commenters or valid content from plausible sounding content. I.E. Low Subject Expertise thresholds.

4 is what keeps a community boring, while keeping the SNR high.