> In the wake of all this drama, a blog post titled "Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth" went viral and hit the top of Hacker News. Which you might have missed, because Hacker News — which is owned by Y Combinator — seems to have manually dropped the post lower in the rankings to suppress its visibility.
Is this true? I never thought HN moderated content critical of itself
"Less" doesn't mean "we don't moderate at all"—that would be too big a loophole. "Less" means "do what we normally would, but not as much". That way we can keep the front page reasonably close to the site mandate while still having a consistent approach to conflicts of interest.
For example, if a story is the kind of thing we'd normally downweight off the front page (e.g. because it's a typical opinion piece or drama that isn't intellectually interesting), then "do what we normally would, only less" might mean that the article ends up halfway down the frontpage, whereas normally we'd downrank it off the frontpage altogether.
This approach goes back to the first morning that pg was showing me how he moderated HN and it was literally the first thing he said to me, before I had a chance to grab a chair. He kind of barked it actually - 'whatever you do, don't do that!'
10 years later, it has held up well: it's a simple rule, easy to be both transparent and consistent about, that addresses one of the hardest aspects of running a site like HN. It doesn't work perfectly (nothing on HN can work perfectly, for the simple reason that different segments of the community want different things) but I find it hard to imagine a better tradeoff.
This doesn't stop people from jumping to inaccurate conclusions (such as "HN mods suppress bad stories about YC" when in fact we do the opposite), but it does mean we can answer questions in good conscience, which is vital not only to community goodwill but also our own morale.
The thread reached the top of Hacker News, then went to #15. It spent 5 hours on the front page, which is a lot longer than it would have if the topic hadn't been YC-related. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846 for more.
The bias on the site is really terrible. It's not always YComb itself so much, but all the valley stuff.
As with anything you have "the powerful people" who have opinions on what critiques are "fair", and will demand them communicated with perfect decorum.
Additionally, people are aware of how it will "look". In a way they don't care, but in reality there's always an appearance people prefer to keep.
Anyway actually break out some pointy critiques, and they'll get mad.
Is this supposed to assauge the concerns of the public? Is dang not employed by, and thus a representative of, Y Combinator? There is every reason to believe he is directly responsible for protecting the interests of the company.
"Company investigated Company and found that Company did nothing wrong"
> and he has never given me any reason to doubt his integrity
in other news: man kills his family, neighbours swear they were a normal happy family, It's totally unexpected, we never would have thought something like this could happen
past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior if and only if nothing else changes.
not speaking about dang specifically, but IMO it's a bit different to not do something when it benefits your reputation and to not do anything when it can harm your job safety.
I'm sure nobody has hard proof either way, but there's certainly an ongoing pattern of the symptom. This place only exists to promote YC, so you can decide for yourself which is the simplest explanation.
That’s a pretty wild quote from Matthew Duke Pan, one of the PearAI “founders”:
> dawg i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just lmk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be
bothered with legal
If you are depending on an open source project for your startup, why say “Get dat shit outta here” after you change its name to your product? If its shit then why use it?
Saved you two clicks
“PearAI, an open-source AI code editor. When people looked at its code they found that it was a clone of an existing open-source project called Continue.dev.”
Why should people be dissuaded from clicking twice to develop a more nuanced take of their own than a two sentence summary from a stranger with unknown biases?
Regardless of what you think of Pear, making the claim that they have damaged Y Combinator's reputation is pretty dramatic.
Knowing the title is in reference to Pear (and not something that could be _actually_ damaging to YC's rep) lets me know the article is probably isnt worth the time.
Readit News
Is this true? I never thought HN moderated content critical of itself
"Less" doesn't mean "we don't moderate at all"—that would be too big a loophole. "Less" means "do what we normally would, but not as much". That way we can keep the front page reasonably close to the site mandate while still having a consistent approach to conflicts of interest.
For example, if a story is the kind of thing we'd normally downweight off the front page (e.g. because it's a typical opinion piece or drama that isn't intellectually interesting), then "do what we normally would, only less" might mean that the article ends up halfway down the frontpage, whereas normally we'd downrank it off the frontpage altogether.
This approach goes back to the first morning that pg was showing me how he moderated HN and it was literally the first thing he said to me, before I had a chance to grab a chair. He kind of barked it actually - 'whatever you do, don't do that!'
10 years later, it has held up well: it's a simple rule, easy to be both transparent and consistent about, that addresses one of the hardest aspects of running a site like HN. It doesn't work perfectly (nothing on HN can work perfectly, for the simple reason that different segments of the community want different things) but I find it hard to imagine a better tradeoff.
This doesn't stop people from jumping to inaccurate conclusions (such as "HN mods suppress bad stories about YC" when in fact we do the opposite), but it does mean we can answer questions in good conscience, which is vital not only to community goodwill but also our own morale.
https://hnrankings.info/41697032/
this happens very, very frequently
Like the CA admissions thread wasn't on the frontpage initially for under 24h and it had 3x the comments as the YC thread. https://hnrankings.info/41697032,41700516/
I understand that articles don’t just climb due to the magnitude of upvotes, but also the velocity or upvote rate.
All kinds of articles don’t stick to the top, to me the more likely explanation is that the rate of upvotes was not sustained.
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As with anything you have "the powerful people" who have opinions on what critiques are "fair", and will demand them communicated with perfect decorum.
Additionally, people are aware of how it will "look". In a way they don't care, but in reality there's always an appearance people prefer to keep.
Anyway actually break out some pointy critiques, and they'll get mad.
Dang said they didn't do it and it's being flagged by users.
Which obviously makes sense of you think about it.
"Company investigated Company and found that Company did nothing wrong"
in other news: man kills his family, neighbours swear they were a normal happy family, It's totally unexpected, we never would have thought something like this could happen
past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior if and only if nothing else changes.
not speaking about dang specifically, but IMO it's a bit different to not do something when it benefits your reputation and to not do anything when it can harm your job safety.
Community goodwill is the only value HN has, so we take our lumps when we have to, rather than jeopardize that.
Deleted Comment
> dawg i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just lmk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal
[https://x.com/anothercohen/status/1840515897804623882/photo/...]
I genuinely don't understand how you can make a business based on open source and not get IP lawyers involved.
As an investor I'd probably pick passion and dedication over maturity and responsibility too
The header image of his X account is also telling regarding his priorities: https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/header_photo
If you are depending on an open source project for your startup, why say “Get dat shit outta here” after you change its name to your product? If its shit then why use it?
Our software changed it to the canonical URL it got from that page, which was https://www.indiehackers.com/starting-up/the-ai-startup-dram...
I'll change to your link above now. Thanks!
p.s. I would have done this sooner but wasn't aware of this thread until an hour or so ago
Including Void, Continue, and PearAI.
Knowing the title is in reference to Pear (and not something that could be _actually_ damaging to YC's rep) lets me know the article is probably isnt worth the time.
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YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41707495 - Oct 2024 (256 comments)
Pear AI founder: We made two big mistakes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41701265 - Sept 2024 (228 comments)
Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697032 - Sept 2024 (244 comments)