My account got deleted and i've spent over $7 in the last 2 years and disabled adverts this week and it got deleted.
If I can't get my data back then doubt I'll ever use Adwords again...
All my production buddies hate it. They pay full price, your the world and yet Soundcloud take down the tracks that they OWN. With no recourse or apology. Their system has been broken for 5 years at least for the power users in the community.
I'm responsible for that stuff with HN, and you have it backwards, both about this post and about the site in general. If anyone were "boosting" YC's "stats", I'd know: I look at the data obsessively. And I'm no stats-booster. As for this post, the votes on it look as genuine to me as on any popular story.
Everyone here agrees that the way for HN to benefit YC's business is simply to have the best possible content. So we spend all our time working on the global optimum—how to get quality up—and zero time promoting this or that.
While I'm at it, if any of you have ideas about how to get HN's quality up, please send them to hn@ycombinator.com.
I believe you. At the same time, even if HN does not boost YC related threads I strongly suspect that you do occasionally penalize threads critical of YC backed companies.
We—and I personally—go out of our way not to do that. I could cite several recent examples of critical threads about YC cos that were on the front page, which we might have penalized had they been about anybody else [1]. But I'm not going to list them because that wouldn't be fair.
[1] We sometimes penalize posts castigating companies for something the poster didn't like, because the resulting threads tend to be indignation-fueled rather than substantive.
Again, I believe you, but this has happened in the past unless I'm very much mistaken.
To date I've been very much impressed with your efforts to bring transparency to the moderation. Thanks for all the hard work.
As for your caveat: that's a very fine line. And if selectively enforced it could still have the same effect. I know that YC owns HN and that's all fine and good until there is a conflict of interest. And I personally feel that HN is more important than YC (though, of course the YC founders & partners would probably disagree with that, as is their good right).
Thanks! Now how about some more highly technical jacquesm classics? :)
Not sure I'm getting you about the caveat, unless you mean that we shouldn't penalize any threads. If we didn't do that, the front page would be overrun with low-quality controversies and shouting matches: in davidw's words, "articles that get you riled up, but really don't lead to any productive or interesting discussions". [1]
So there's editorial judgment involved. There always has been. HN has always been a blend of voting and curation.
What I'm saying above is that we exercise that editorial judgment less, not more, when YC-startup-related controversies crop up—precisely because we don't want to be accused of censorship for venal purposes. Of course people accuse us of precisely that anyway, but that goes with the territory. I don't expect not to get acccused; I do want to be able to reply in good conscience.
Two more caveats for you. I'm not saying there aren't unconscious biases—that would be foolish—just that we consciously try hard to guard against them. I'm also not saying that every bad story about YC gets a free pass to the front page. The bar may be lower, but it still exists. When articles come up that are just plain terrible, we don't, in Mrs. Thatcher's immortal words, go wobbly.
The "Drop Dropbox" story you cite is an example of all this. I initially penalized it. Why? Because it's a classic specimen of the riler-uppers davidw was talking about. The penalty made it go from #1 to the lower part of the front page. However, I forgot that Dropbox was a YC company (perhaps they're so big that I don't think of them as a startup any more). When someone reminded me of that, my first thought was that we needed to lighten the penalty and I immediately went and did so. That made the post go to #9. From then on, we didn't touch it at all [2]. The reason it fell from there was because, as incredibly many votes as it got, it got even more incredibly many flags. I just wrote some code to scan the last million posts to HN and sort them by flaggedness. That post is the most flagged by far; it has 3x as many flags as the next. (In the same data set, it is the third most upvoted story and has 11% more votes than the next.)
[2] Actually, we did. A moderator fat-finger later that evening caused several things to happen, one of which was killing that story. I saw that in the logs and immediately reversed it, along with all the other effects of the fat-finger. I think the story was in that killed state for a couple hours. And now you have a complete dump of my memory about "Drop Dropbox". For the love of God or at least Mrs. Thatcher, please, no more "examples" tonight!
(Also, once Kevin's mobile-friendly markup is out, there should be no more moderator fat-fingers.)
Edit the morning after: I hasten to add that my Thatcher references were merely an attempt at a joke, not an oblique political statement.
More technical jacquesm classics take a while to produce :) But I'm sure something will pop up sooner or later, as soon as my current batch of commitments has been dealt with.
Thank you very much for the explanation, much appreciated. Interesting facts there about the flags. I've long since lost my flagging, posting and upvoting ability so none of that was mine, I merely wondered as an observer because the rankings of that page made absolutely no sense at times and I did spot it when it got deleted and then re-appeared.
Since we're speculating, it's possible that it's not YC doing that but rather the YC alumni collectively flagging negative stories. It doesn't even need to be a conspiracy since there are so many alums that they're unlikely to all hold the same views. Of course, this speculation is based on the idea that the actions of YC alums have more weighting than the rest of us.
I have no idea what you are referring to with boosted stats, and I don't believe they exist.
I would say the biggest cause of this is likely the hundreds or thousands of people who applied to YC and are watching HN to see if any replies have gone out. This topic answers their question, so they upvoted it.
Read those threads more carefully. The first only claims there are ways to boost OR identify YC alum posts (pg clarifies). The second implies you get a "boost" but does not say that HN itself gives that boost.
As someone who tangentially interacted with YC founders, I can confirm that HN does not inherently boost posts, but HN does identify YC alum posts to other YC alums, which is probably the source of the "boost". In fact, HN on several occasions has penalized YC alum posts (upvote ring detection).
Saying YC employees have boosted stats implies that HN boosts those stats inherently. But that's not true. What happens is the same as what happens when people post their HN submissions on twitter/Facebook and tell all their friends about their HN post.
I guess it depends on if you think that things that boost behaviours inherently are included or if only software counts. I see it more akin to if some users submissions were automatically tweeted whereas others had to copy and paste.
I didnt realise they had taken out the alerts on their dashboards that led to YC members being picked up by the vote ring detection.
Their comments show up as Orange to other members, I would imagine that this would boost the amount of upvotes and assume that they would never get shadow banned etc.
The fact that this comment got pretty much the most number of downvotes on my account may indicate that these posts do get attention. The fact that YC can see submitters voting history etc might also play into it.
YC founders' usernames do show up in orange to one another. This is one of two YC-specific privileges I know of (or at least remember at this late hour) on Hacker News. The other is that only YC companies are allowed to post job ads (and then only through /jobs).
For a while, it was also the case that YC founders could see a list of submissions by other YC founders. But PG got rid of that over a year ago. It turned out to have voting-ring-like effects, which was never the intent behind it.
There are a few things here that I can see are overhead.
- It was an established design consultancy, that takes time and money to create.
- They charge the customer 3x what they paid you, but you dont know if the customer paid up. The had a contract, but then so did you, and you only got 8% of the bonus. You got pad your wage regardless of if they got paid.
- The pulled in the big client, this is almost important as a solo contractor, its their reputation on the line if you mess up. Its really hard to get those contracts or you need to have a contact. It's not uncommon for sales people to make 30% on big sales to land the contract on good terms.
- You did all the work, but could they have employed someone else, or are you the only person that could do it?
- Did they pay for health insurance, sick days etc?
> Its really hard to get those contracts or you need to have a contact.
Tech people often view this almost as an abstraction problem, or one that rightly wouldn't/shouldn't exist if nerds ran the world. I don't know if it would or wouldn't if us nerds ran the world, but in our actual world, finding and maintaining those relationships is very hard and very valuable.
you get better terms this way and is a way to shut out competitors that are considering entering your space (because they know you can burn money to stop them getting traction)
Yes. People don't purchase the iPad alone, but for the ecosystem. I moved to Android but just bought an iPad as it has an App I need for work that isnt available on any Tablet OS. Thats why theyre able to do it and still win over the others.
