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HackerNews is a marketing channel for a technology investment firm. Why should they care about balanced conversation? What if those balanced conversations some

HackerNews is a marketing channel for a technology investment firm. Why should they care about balanced conversation? What if those balanced conversations somehow promote criticism of companies that they are involved with?

ywecur 11y ago
They obviously care as they implement extensive moding to avoid this place from devolving into something like Reddit.
zeofig 11y ago
So the community itself should have no say in how things work? It's this sort of attitude that leads me to make comments which get downvoted. More logically, Ycomb gets a lot of prestige and "free" marketing from the quality and popularity of HN. It's in their interests to maintain and improve that quality. Besides, they're hardly going to lose clients because a couple of negative comments don't get downvoted into oblivion as swiftly as before.
grahamburger 11y ago
Groups of people only become mindlessly profit driven when that's the last common goal they have left. In a large enough group that seems to always happen because people's goals are so diverse, but I suspect that HN team is still small enough to have some common goals outside of just collecting a paycheck.
wfo 11y ago
They should care because they've created an excellent community and a wonderful forum for thoughtful discussion, not many of which exist on the internet. It's something to embrace and be proud of. It's not perfect but it puts every other fairly large public internet forum I've seen to shame. Not everything has to be done for economic gain. If you want to pretend it's all a ruse to make more money then you are free to consider having such a robust discussion forum to be good PR for Y Combinator; it garners an enormous amount of goodwill and respect in the tech community. And they do care about earnest thoughtful balanced conversation. There are plenty of posts critical of YC companies or PG or you name it that are not censored. Mods interact with the community regularly to enforce standards and curate post quality.

ywecur 11y ago

They obviously care as they implement extensive moding to avoid this place from devolving into something like Reddit.

zeofig 11y ago

So the community itself should have no say in how things work? It's this sort of attitude that leads me to make comments which get downvoted. More logically, Ycomb gets a lot of prestige and "free" marketing from the quality and popularity of HN. It's in their interests to maintain and improve that quality. Besides, they're hardly going to lose clients because a couple of negative comments don't get downvoted into oblivion as swiftly as before.

grahamburger 11y ago

Groups of people only become mindlessly profit driven when that's the last common goal they have left. In a large enough group that seems to always happen because people's goals are so diverse, but I suspect that HN team is still small enough to have some common goals outside of just collecting a paycheck.

wfo 11y ago

They should care because they've created an excellent community and a wonderful forum for thoughtful discussion, not many of which exist on the internet. It's something to embrace and be proud of. It's not perfect but it puts every other fairly large public internet forum I've seen to shame. Not everything has to be done for economic gain. If you want to pretend it's all a ruse to make more money then you are free to consider having such a robust discussion forum to be good PR for Y Combinator; it garners an enormous amount of goodwill and respect in the tech community. And they do care about earnest thoughtful balanced conversation. There are plenty of posts critical of YC companies or PG or you name it that are not censored. Mods interact with the community regularly to enforce standards and curate post quality.