3 ms·

I know what you are saying and I agree and am grateful for it's existance but keep in mind that HN is a marketing tool of a big VC fund. It has money to pay a

by dewey 4y ago

I know what you are saying and I agree and am grateful for it's existance but keep in mind that HN is a marketing tool of a big VC fund. It has money to pay a moderator and doesn't need to directly make money from it by putting ads or tracking scripts up like other sites.

mbil 4y ago
Yes, and there are often YC company job postings on the front page, which are technically ads.
- Alex3917 4y ago
  And there's a favicon so it's not text-only. /s
  - dang 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34460478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34460478
dredmorbius 4y ago
Appropriately motivated and principled patronage ... is a fairly good media model. Far superior to naked advertising. On par with public or membership sponsorship.
- mopsi 4y ago
  People often say that the internet would die without intrusive ad tracking. HN is a pretty good example of the opposite, and there are many others. An electronics store I frequent hosts old-school electronics forum, a nearby youth hobby center hosts news and forums for scale model building, and so forth.
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    The smaller your audience, the less likely you are to get trolls and just the general population of morons.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      True, though if that's your starting cohort, or they do move in in any significant way, You Now Are Having Troll Problem. Another element is that HN's audience is largely self-segmenting such that targeted advertising would probably offer little additional benefit. The startup-founder and tech-worker pools are already global and are largely automatically segmented (filtered for) by HN's content, site dynamics, and reputation.
dang 4y ago
> It has money to pay a moderator and doesn't need to directly make money from it Yes, that's the sweet spot that HN ended up in, kind of by historical accident, and it seems to be a local optimum. If we had to make money from HN in any of the standard squeezy ways, it would get worse, which would degrade if not ruin the community. It would also be a miserable slog and who would want to work on that? so the quality would go down that way too. There are a lot of gradients along which the quality would go down. Because we don't have to do that, we can focus on just trying to keep the community happy, which boils down to trying to keep HN as good as possible. It's incredibly satisfying to just have to make something good. (Not that it is good...but that's a separate question, and this is the internet and we get graded on a curve.) There are a bunch of old comments here about how we/I think about HN vis-à-vis YC's business interests, if anyone is curious - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=yc%20business%20interests%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

by dewey 4y ago

mbil 4y ago

Yes, and there are often YC company job postings on the front page, which are technically ads.

Alex3917 4y ago
And there's a favicon so it's not text-only. /s
- dang 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34460478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34460478

dredmorbius 4y ago

Appropriately motivated and principled patronage ... is a fairly good media model. Far superior to naked advertising. On par with public or membership sponsorship.

mopsi 4y ago
People often say that the internet would die without intrusive ad tracking. HN is a pretty good example of the opposite, and there are many others. An electronics store I frequent hosts old-school electronics forum, a nearby youth hobby center hosts news and forums for scale model building, and so forth.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  The smaller your audience, the less likely you are to get trolls and just the general population of morons.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    True, though if that's your starting cohort, or they do move in in any significant way, You Now Are Having Troll Problem. Another element is that HN's audience is largely self-segmenting such that targeted advertising would probably offer little additional benefit. The startup-founder and tech-worker pools are already global and are largely automatically segmented (filtered for) by HN's content, site dynamics, and reputation.

dang 4y ago

> It has money to pay a moderator and doesn't need to directly make money from it Yes, that's the sweet spot that HN ended up in, kind of by historical accident, and it seems to be a local optimum. If we had to make money from HN in any of the standard squeezy ways, it would get worse, which would degrade if not ruin the community. It would also be a miserable slog and who would want to work on that? so the quality would go down that way too. There are a lot of gradients along which the quality would go down. Because we don't have to do that, we can focus on just trying to keep the community happy, which boils down to trying to keep HN as good as possible. It's incredibly satisfying to just have to make something good. (Not that it is good...but that's a separate question, and this is the internet and we get graded on a curve.) There are a bunch of old comments here about how we/I think about HN vis-à-vis YC's business interests, if anyone is curious - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=yc%20business%20interests%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....