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Hacker News is a long-running, open, inclusive startup community that is subsidized by a related business, doesn't sell anything, and has proven time and again

by birken 11y ago

Hacker News is a long-running, open, inclusive startup community that is subsidized by a related business, doesn't sell anything, and has proven time and again to do things good for the entire startup community. Product Hunt is a new, closed, exclusive startup community run by a for-profit company that will eventually have to start selling you something. Not sure why people complain about PH so much... just don't use it. There already is a perfectly good community of startup people out there that has much more incentive to stay "pure" than a for-profit one. Sure, HN isn't perfect, but fundamentally it is always going to be better than any for-profit communities. (And also this obligatory comment: If you want to build a successful company, stop wasting your time browsing startup communities and spend your time talking with users and building your product)

jl87 11y ago
HN is equally rigged. The mods regularly change headlines, remove posts, and allow YC companies to post on the front page.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  1. Headlines are changed to match the article verbatim, or if the article is linkbait, the title is changed to nonlinkbait (the latter might be more frequent case from your submission history) 2. Again, users flag. Rarely moderators remove posts other than that. 3. Those are job ads, which have a set decay time and always start at #6.
  - gearoidoc 11y ago
    I think you're off on 2 and 3 - although I only have anecdata to make me believe so. On point 2: I've often found posts which are gaining traction on the homepage which do not subscribe to the 'scale fast'-centric belief system of YC are pulled. Most recently this one by DHH: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider 3. They're not all job ads. Stripe updates their API and it goes straight to #1? Come on...
    - minimaxir 11y ago
      2. Er, the Medium version of that article got 906 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422 3. Stripe is a rather large company that happens to be a YC company. Keep in mind that Product Hunt is YC too and you're commenting on a negative article about it currently ranked at #4 on the front page.
      - gearoidoc 11y ago
        2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page. 3. There are plenty of rather large companies that don't get as much attention here as Stripe does (I don't have anything against Stripe btw, just using them as an example in this case). If HN pulled this article it would be pretty damning on the part of YC. The placement of this article in question does not disprove my previous points. FWIW, I've enjoyed relatively decent success from my own product launches on HN. EDIT: re: medium - I mistook you the first time. Apologies. My point still stands re: posts being pulled.
        girvo 11y ago
        > 2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page. Oh come on now, you've been here long enough to know that HN attempts to avoid duplicates within days of each other. Of course that one was pulled when the other post of the same content had a huge upvote count and lively discussion.
      - barrkel 11y ago
        I didn't see either version of the article and I visit HN several times throughout the day. You'd think an article with such a high vote count and low comment count would stick around much longer than it did - there's even mention of its amazing disappearing act in the comments.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  - eterm 11y ago
    If you look at HN ranking trackers then you'll see there are definitely artificial adjustments to the rankings of articles. Mostly that is downwards but sometimes upwards too. HN is mostly fair, but don't trick yourself into believing it is completely fair.
    - venning 11y ago
      There are factors beyond naive weightings, as well. I remember reading somewhere that if a thread becomes too heated or turns into a flamewar, the mods have the ability to suppress it in the rankings artificially to let it cool off. That functionality makes sense, but wouldn't be easily identified in a third-party tracker. A lot of comments here seem to be assigning moderation as bias.
  - jl87 11y ago
    Ya - I think #1 is crap. If it gets upvoted then let it stay. Let the people decide what they want - not one person. IF that's the case, just get rid of upvoting completely and make this all about the mods.
    - minimaxir 11y ago
      > Let the people decide what they want That isn't valid when the linkbait nature of titles entices uses to upvote content they otherwise would not have.
    - dang 11y ago
      I understand the logic there, but it would mean the end of HN, because intellectual curiosity is not the most powerful curiosity, even among intellectually-oriented people.
- gearoidoc 11y ago
  This shouldn't be downvoted. HN is far from a meritocracy. Gamey as f*ck.
prawn 11y ago
There already is a perfectly good community of startup people out there that has much more incentive to stay "pure" than a for-profit one. Until you finally launch, submit a Show HN to have your perceived turn in the sun and it completely bombs. I can see why people look to alternatives for a chance to get feedback or traction for their product, whether it's dominated by insiders or not. I don't visit Product Hunt but have had a product top their daily list on launch and it was helpful. The equivalent Show HN didn't really go anywhere.
- dang 11y ago
  > Until you finally launch, submit a Show HN to have your perceived turn in the sun and it completely bombs We sometimes invite people to repost those or (if not too much time has gone by) we give them a second shot at the front page. There's one on the front page now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10730695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10730695. Helping the best content to surface is hard. Anyone who knows of a good post that deserves a second chance should email us (hn@ycombinator.com). Eventually we may build support for this into the software.
  - will_brown 11y ago
    I can attest. I had two submissions that were inexplicably removed from the front page (both Show HN's). I emailed to ask why and in both instances dang reinstated my submissions.
    - prdonahue 11y ago
      Were you told why they were removed from the front page? That's more interesting to me/the community than the fact he reinstated.
      - dang 11y ago
        We always tell people. False positives by the voting ring detector in that case, IIRC.
      - 11y ago
acomjean 11y ago
Reminds me: Check the "show" (hacker news) link on the main menu more often.
myth_buster 11y ago
Sure, HN isn't perfect One of the biases that affects HN is the demographics. A lot of the HNers I would assume are working at big tech firms and their stories gets (unintentionally) upvoted to the front page as normalizing this feature would be quite difficult.
personjerry 11y ago
Interesting... isn't ProductHunt a YC company?
argonaut 11y ago
FWIW, HN is implicitly biased towards YC companies, because posts by YC founders show up in a different color to other YC founders, which is an implicit voting ring of sorts. This may no longer be the case; it was the case a few years ago to my knowledge.
- mmastrac 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the only privileged positions YC holds on HN today are the top-left link and the job posts that are not eligible for votes or comments.
  - jdp23 11y ago
    And writing the algorithms. And setting policies. And employing the moderator. And ... Whether this privileged position leads to different treatment for YC companies is a different question -- as Dan says, they try not to be biased and potentially even overcompensate. Still, the privileged position is certainly there.
    - dang 11y ago
      You're exactly right—it's a privileged position, and a delicate one. Without the trust and the interest of the community, HN wouldn't be worth much, so those are the two things we care about most.
  - argonaut 11y ago
    The author handles show up in a different color to other YC founders. That's another benefit.
- dang 11y ago
  YC alumni see each other's usernames in orange. That plus the job post on the front page are the two YC-specific things that HN has. Both have been in place for a long time, and moderators try to be meticulous about not giving special treatment beyond that. (I say "try to be" because no one is the best judge of their own biases. But we do try hard, sometimes to the point of overcompensating.) I don't think the colored usernames affect voting ring activity much. YC alumni and startups certainly are not exempt from the penalties we put on such activity, and frequently get hit by them. The first thing we always tell YC founders is not to solicit upvotes for posts because that backfires.
awakeasleep 11y ago
Stripe insiders have been leaking sales numbers and fraud numbers of stripe merchants to the press lately. (Without permission from the merchants). None of those articles have been successful on Hacker News, despite the fact that they are materially important to many of our businesses. (When and why are businesses metrics and Stripe support emails leaked to the press? Was that against company policy? Has the issue that caused it been addressed?) http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/steal-a-credit-card-buy-a-hoverboard http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/steal-a-credit-card-...
- onewaystreet 11y ago
  Because it's a BuzzFeed story. BuzzFeed still isn't taken seriously as a real source of news even if that isn't fair any longer.
- dang 11y ago
  Actually that article made it into our second-chance pool (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 and earlier posts linked from there), which placed it on the front page, where it stayed for about 90 minutes. Its problem was that it got few upvotes. It was also penalized by the flamewar detector (because there was a super active discussion relative to the upvotes). Had we seen that we would have taken the penalty off, but it wouldn't have made much difference because that wasn't why it fell off the front page to begin with.
- pc 11y ago
  (Stripe's CEO here.) It is emphatically against our policy. The employee involved was identified before the article was published and they no longer work at Stripe.
  - markdown 11y ago
    Why do we not know who he is? Is it not a crime in the US to leak/steal data and leak it to third parties? You've released this scumbag back into the pool to continue his shenanigans elsewhere. You've covered your ass, and now he's someone else's problem, right?
odbol 11y ago
"eventually have to start selling you something" I'm pretty sure they already are. See any ads on Product Hunt? Turns out the entire site is an ad. I wouldn't at all be surprised if companies like Microsoft paid PH to get on the front page.

by birken 11y ago

jl87 11y ago

HN is equally rigged. The mods regularly change headlines, remove posts, and allow YC companies to post on the front page.

minimaxir 11y ago
1. Headlines are changed to match the article verbatim, or if the article is linkbait, the title is changed to nonlinkbait (the latter might be more frequent case from your submission history) 2. Again, users flag. Rarely moderators remove posts other than that. 3. Those are job ads, which have a set decay time and always start at #6.
- gearoidoc 11y ago
  I think you're off on 2 and 3 - although I only have anecdata to make me believe so. On point 2: I've often found posts which are gaining traction on the homepage which do not subscribe to the 'scale fast'-centric belief system of YC are pulled. Most recently this one by DHH: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider 3. They're not all job ads. Stripe updates their API and it goes straight to #1? Come on...
  - minimaxir 11y ago
    2. Er, the Medium version of that article got 906 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506422 3. Stripe is a rather large company that happens to be a YC company. Keep in mind that Product Hunt is YC too and you're commenting on a negative article about it currently ranked at #4 on the front page.
    - gearoidoc 11y ago
      2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page. 3. There are plenty of rather large companies that don't get as much attention here as Stripe does (I don't have anything against Stripe btw, just using them as an example in this case). If HN pulled this article it would be pretty damning on the part of YC. The placement of this article in question does not disprove my previous points. FWIW, I've enjoyed relatively decent success from my own product launches on HN. EDIT: re: medium - I mistook you the first time. Apologies. My point still stands re: posts being pulled.
      - girvo 11y ago
        > 2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page. Oh come on now, you've been here long enough to know that HN attempts to avoid duplicates within days of each other. Of course that one was pulled when the other post of the same content had a huge upvote count and lively discussion.
    - barrkel 11y ago
      I didn't see either version of the article and I visit HN several times throughout the day. You'd think an article with such a high vote count and low comment count would stick around much longer than it did - there's even mention of its amazing disappearing act in the comments.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- eterm 11y ago
  If you look at HN ranking trackers then you'll see there are definitely artificial adjustments to the rankings of articles. Mostly that is downwards but sometimes upwards too. HN is mostly fair, but don't trick yourself into believing it is completely fair.
  - venning 11y ago
    There are factors beyond naive weightings, as well. I remember reading somewhere that if a thread becomes too heated or turns into a flamewar, the mods have the ability to suppress it in the rankings artificially to let it cool off. That functionality makes sense, but wouldn't be easily identified in a third-party tracker. A lot of comments here seem to be assigning moderation as bias.
- jl87 11y ago
  Ya - I think #1 is crap. If it gets upvoted then let it stay. Let the people decide what they want - not one person. IF that's the case, just get rid of upvoting completely and make this all about the mods.
  - minimaxir 11y ago
    > Let the people decide what they want That isn't valid when the linkbait nature of titles entices uses to upvote content they otherwise would not have.
  - dang 11y ago
    I understand the logic there, but it would mean the end of HN, because intellectual curiosity is not the most powerful curiosity, even among intellectually-oriented people.
gearoidoc 11y ago
This shouldn't be downvoted. HN is far from a meritocracy. Gamey as f*ck.

prawn 11y ago

There already is a perfectly good community of startup people out there that has much more incentive to stay "pure" than a for-profit one. Until you finally launch, submit a Show HN to have your perceived turn in the sun and it completely bombs. I can see why people look to alternatives for a chance to get feedback or traction for their product, whether it's dominated by insiders or not. I don't visit Product Hunt but have had a product top their daily list on launch and it was helpful. The equivalent Show HN didn't really go anywhere.

dang 11y ago
> Until you finally launch, submit a Show HN to have your perceived turn in the sun and it completely bombs We sometimes invite people to repost those or (if not too much time has gone by) we give them a second shot at the front page. There's one on the front page now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10730695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10730695. Helping the best content to surface is hard. Anyone who knows of a good post that deserves a second chance should email us (hn@ycombinator.com). Eventually we may build support for this into the software.
- will_brown 11y ago
  I can attest. I had two submissions that were inexplicably removed from the front page (both Show HN's). I emailed to ask why and in both instances dang reinstated my submissions.
  - prdonahue 11y ago
    Were you told why they were removed from the front page? That's more interesting to me/the community than the fact he reinstated.
    - dang 11y ago
      We always tell people. False positives by the voting ring detector in that case, IIRC.
    - 11y ago

acomjean 11y ago

Reminds me: Check the "show" (hacker news) link on the main menu more often.

myth_buster 11y ago

Sure, HN isn't perfect One of the biases that affects HN is the demographics. A lot of the HNers I would assume are working at big tech firms and their stories gets (unintentionally) upvoted to the front page as normalizing this feature would be quite difficult.

personjerry 11y ago

Interesting... isn't ProductHunt a YC company?

argonaut 11y ago

FWIW, HN is implicitly biased towards YC companies, because posts by YC founders show up in a different color to other YC founders, which is an implicit voting ring of sorts. This may no longer be the case; it was the case a few years ago to my knowledge.

mmastrac 11y ago
I'm pretty sure that the only privileged positions YC holds on HN today are the top-left link and the job posts that are not eligible for votes or comments.
- jdp23 11y ago
  And writing the algorithms. And setting policies. And employing the moderator. And ... Whether this privileged position leads to different treatment for YC companies is a different question -- as Dan says, they try not to be biased and potentially even overcompensate. Still, the privileged position is certainly there.
  - dang 11y ago
    You're exactly right—it's a privileged position, and a delicate one. Without the trust and the interest of the community, HN wouldn't be worth much, so those are the two things we care about most.
- argonaut 11y ago
  The author handles show up in a different color to other YC founders. That's another benefit.
dang 11y ago
YC alumni see each other's usernames in orange. That plus the job post on the front page are the two YC-specific things that HN has. Both have been in place for a long time, and moderators try to be meticulous about not giving special treatment beyond that. (I say "try to be" because no one is the best judge of their own biases. But we do try hard, sometimes to the point of overcompensating.) I don't think the colored usernames affect voting ring activity much. YC alumni and startups certainly are not exempt from the penalties we put on such activity, and frequently get hit by them. The first thing we always tell YC founders is not to solicit upvotes for posts because that backfires.

awakeasleep 11y ago

Stripe insiders have been leaking sales numbers and fraud numbers of stripe merchants to the press lately. (Without permission from the merchants). None of those articles have been successful on Hacker News, despite the fact that they are materially important to many of our businesses. (When and why are businesses metrics and Stripe support emails leaked to the press? Was that against company policy? Has the issue that caused it been addressed?) http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/steal-a-credit-card-buy-a-hoverboard http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/steal-a-credit-card-...

onewaystreet 11y ago
Because it's a BuzzFeed story. BuzzFeed still isn't taken seriously as a real source of news even if that isn't fair any longer.
dang 11y ago
Actually that article made it into our second-chance pool (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 and earlier posts linked from there), which placed it on the front page, where it stayed for about 90 minutes. Its problem was that it got few upvotes. It was also penalized by the flamewar detector (because there was a super active discussion relative to the upvotes). Had we seen that we would have taken the penalty off, but it wouldn't have made much difference because that wasn't why it fell off the front page to begin with.
pc 11y ago
(Stripe's CEO here.) It is emphatically against our policy. The employee involved was identified before the article was published and they no longer work at Stripe.
- markdown 11y ago
  Why do we not know who he is? Is it not a crime in the US to leak/steal data and leak it to third parties? You've released this scumbag back into the pool to continue his shenanigans elsewhere. You've covered your ass, and now he's someone else's problem, right?

odbol 11y ago

"eventually have to start selling you something" I'm pretty sure they already are. See any ads on Product Hunt? Turns out the entire site is an ad. I wouldn't at all be surprised if companies like Microsoft paid PH to get on the front page.