
Ask HN: What is Hacker News's business model? - antonpuz
I know HN is owned by Y-Combinator. But, as a popular and homogeneous platform there must be many possible ways to earn from it. So what is HN&#x27;s business model and how its value is measured?
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lefstathiou
My humble perspective, HN serves several purposes:

1) Top of the funnel lead gen for emerging companies (for YC to invest in).

2) Persistent advertising for the YC brand. You can’t use HN without
associating it with Y Combinator and by being useful it brings in millions of
views to the brand at relatively little cost

3) A proprietary way to learn more about the founders they invest in. I’ve
read a users HN profile (what they like dislike, quality of comments) is an
important source of unadulterated intel.

As for value, I wouldn’t know how to calculate it but given the size of their
“classes” and speed of rise, it clearly serves as a very effective in bound
funnel for investing in quality startups. Definitely in the millions, not sure
if billions unless it directly contributed to their biggest and best
investments.

EDIT: I’ve left out other ancillary benefits like a distribution platform for
YC companies looking to hire and such.

Lastly, value is relative. The value of HN to YC (or to perhaps other VCs) is
larger than the value to say me who couldn’t make as much use of the benefits
enumerated above. There are a lot of intangibles here.

~~~
banneduse3r
The biggest benefit is market manipulation and collusion.

What better than to run a "news site", know what your users (who many are C
levels, or VC projects by YC) are watching and how and when they are
commenting. By running that, they can glean an impressive amount of
proprietary information.

YC can also control the narrative. "Voting ring detectors", shadowbans,
blacklist names on articles all have a real and a hidden reason. And with no
transparency, how do we know what they're doing and why?

And did you know there's a secret YC-founder only feature. founders funded
under YC can see each other as orange usernames. The rest of us.. Well. They
can collaborate publicly as a bloc but the rest of us are none-the-wiser.

~~~
znpy
> YC can also control the narrative

This. I've been noticing a lot of flagging lately.

~~~
RandomBacon
I've seen a couple of popular posts removed from the front page.

The last one was criticizing Apple.

~~~
dang
Sure, HN is a curated site. Posts get removed from the front page all the
time. This can be because of user flags, software action, and/or moderator
action, in any permutation.

Edit: we don't moderate HN based on who is being criticized or praised, be it
Apple or anyone else. If you're noticing stories criticizing Apple getting
removed, you're probably a critic of Apple. If you were a fan of Apple, you'd
notice stories praising Apple getting removed. I call this the notice-dislike
bias (crappy name, but I don't know a better one):
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment).
This bias dominates people's perceptions of HN to such an extent that I don't
think I've ever seen a single counterexample.

~~~
znpy
Yep, but it feels a lot more "curated" lately.

~~~
dang
People have such feelings based on things that they've recently noticed, but
it is almost always randomness, or perhaps seasonal fluctuations like the rise
of a major ongoing story (the George Floyd-related topics like protests and
policy brutality are the current one, covid before that and still ongoing, and
so on). Those are random too in the sense that HN is bobbing in the waves of
much larger trends. The way we operate the site itself hasn't changed.

------
krapp
My two cents: HN creates and maintains the impression of YCombinator being a
cutting edge nexus for hacker and startup culture, the virtual water cooler
you want to be seen next to saying something clever when important people walk
by. It also provides advertising for YC startups via related threads and the
who's hiring pages.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
It's effective too. I am unaware of any other VC groups attempting to brand
themselves in this way.

------
thenanyu
HN’s business model is to put the YC brand in front of a technical,
entrepreneurial, audience.

------
Apreche
It may not be consciously built towards this purpose, but HN serves primarily
to spread the silicon valley, get-rich quick, startup business, and
entrepreneur culture among software engineers and other technology experts.

YC and other VCs can't continue to exist if people don't continue to believe
in the mythology of silicon valley. Who the hell will work ridiculous hours
and gamble with their livelihood to make some worthless app? All in exchange
for equity worth less than lottery tickets.

~~~
dang
This is ironic, not only because you posted it to HN, but because it's an
absolutely typical HN comment. See the sibling reply to this one for another.

Somehow people post these things without realizing that cynicism about VC,
Silicon Valley, and startups became the conventional position on HN many years
ago, and that far from a contrarian view it's a platitude.

------
dang
I've written about this a few times. If you read these answers and still have
a question that remains unaddressed, I'd love to know what it is. (My plan is
eventually to compile all these repeated answers to HN questions into some
kind of super-FAQ and then retire from comment writing and just link to it,
forever into a bright future.)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285793)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20yc%20business%20interests&sort=byDate&type=comment)

~~~
pvg
You'll still have to comment when you come up with snee.

------
simplyinfinity
Y-Combinator maintains this platform ( in my own opinion ) for two reasons

1) it's a neat place for likeminded people to share and discuss interesting
topics

2) this is a byproduct of 1. by gaining popularity from 1. they gain more
exposure to a lot of smart people, which turns out great when they post job
ads, or new companies reveals, as well as a lot of people apply to
y-combinator, which in turn means they get to be very picky in who they
invest.

But HN doesn't have a business model per se. same with Reddit communities.

~~~
antonpuz
(2) is actually really smart

------
SigmundA
For some reason this post reminded me of a new rule by by Bill Maher:

Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, Bill, the profit motive is what
sustains capitalism." Yes, and our sex drive is what sustains the human
species, but we don't try to fuck everything.

~~~
cercatrova
I beg to differ on that last point, if history serves well as an example.

------
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------
k00b
If it’s anything it’s content marketing for YC. I suspect it’s origin is that
it was just something pg wanted.

~~~
dang
That's true actually. pg had been interested in social news sites for years
(Slashdot because people would post his essays there, but especially
Delicious). He gave the Reddit founders the idea for Reddit, and for a while
was their number one user. But once Reddit started taking off it turned in a
direction that he wasn't as interested in and they stopped implementing his
feature requests, so he built his own. That was one of the motivations for HN.
The others, that I'm aware of, were helping to grow the nascent YC community,
and writing a significant application in Arc.

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feifan
I'm not sure there is a business model or a quantitative framework for
measuring its value. I imagine it's just a cool thing they built and put it
out there ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
smitty1e
1\. Do cool stuff.

2\. ???

3\. Profit!

More seriously, I thought HN was a showcase for arc.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
Not mentioned yet, but occasionally you'll see a job posting (no more than one
or two) on the front page. They blend in well; it could be possible to miss
them now and again.

------
hieu
I don't think this was how it got started but you can think of HN as content
marketing / recruiting channels for YC.

------
antonpuz
Interestingly no one suggested YC could actively contacts inventors which just
share their work/research with the world and suggest mentoring or drive toward
business. It could be seen as a super early lead generator. How
common/possible in this scenario?

~~~
dang
We do that sometimes and I'd like to do more. I think there's huge unrealized
potential in this community.

------
znpy
Mostly to inflate the startup echo chamber so that y combinator can cherry
pick companies to invest into, I guess.

