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If we listened to anything you've taught us, you don't do something you're good at for free. So, why do you run a news site? It's certainly not out of the good

• dang 7y ago
  Of course! But the benefits aren't small and sneaky, they're large and open. HN is valuable to YC simply by being an interesting place on the internet. The most-interesting HN is the most valuable-to-YC HN, the one that is most in YC's business interests. So curiosity is what we're optimizing for: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20yc%20valuable https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20curiosity%20optimiz&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... There's simplicity on the other side too: YC just optimizes for the number of great startups it can fund. How optimizing HN (by keeping it interesting) benefits YC (by helping it fund more great startups) is left as an exercise to the reader [1]. The reason we don't mess around with local optimizations is that they're a bad trade. What matters is the global optimization. Think of the goose that lays the golden eggs. If you have the goose, why focus on an egg or two? Focus on the goose. [1] Actually I'd better not, or someone will make up something nefarious. The reason is that some HN users end up founding YC-funded startups. And many are startups that might not have gotten started otherwise.