alt Hacker NewsThey started it for particular reasons, which can be examined. It's not bad that they did so, but your purpose and what the GP said are basically the same thing.
They're not promoting startups to investors via HN, it's a different kind of promotion. But 'pool of eligible hires' is quite worth a few salaries to maintain, even if others get value from it.
There’s a piece here, written by Paul Graham, which talks about why he started hacker news, written two years after it was launched.
If we take what he wrote at face value, I don’t think the purpose was primarily its promotional value.
https://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
_ Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news._
_ Hacker News is an experiment, and an experiment in a very young field. Sites of this type are only a few years old. Internet conversation generally is only a few decades old. So we've probably only discovered a fraction of what we eventually will._
_ Hacker News is definitely useful. I've learned a lot from things I've read on HN. I've written several essays that began as comments there. So I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time._