Comment by birken
10 years ago
Hacker News is a long-running, open, inclusive startup community that is subsidized by a related business, doesn't sell anything, and has proven time and again to do things good for the entire startup community.
Product Hunt is a new, closed, exclusive startup community run by a for-profit company that will eventually have to start selling you something.
Not sure why people complain about PH so much... just don't use it. There already is a perfectly good community of startup people out there that has much more incentive to stay "pure" than a for-profit one. Sure, HN isn't perfect, but fundamentally it is always going to be better than any for-profit communities.
(And also this obligatory comment: If you want to build a successful company, stop wasting your time browsing startup communities and spend your time talking with users and building your product)
Stripe insiders have been leaking sales numbers and fraud numbers of stripe merchants to the press lately. (Without permission from the merchants).
None of those articles have been successful on Hacker News, despite the fact that they are materially important to many of our businesses. (When and why are businesses metrics and Stripe support emails leaked to the press? Was that against company policy? Has the issue that caused it been addressed?)
http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/steal-a-credit-card-...
(Stripe's CEO here.) It is emphatically against our policy. The employee involved was identified before the article was published and they no longer work at Stripe.
Why did an employee feel motivated to leak that data? What processes have you put in place to prevent a repeat of the event?
Those are the sort of questions that should be addressed in public, not in a side discussion on an unrelated comment thread.
But the actual point of my comment was that HN may have a bit of the PH filtering effect going on.
Why do we not know who he is? Is it not a crime in the US to leak/steal data and leak it to third parties?
You've released this scumbag back into the pool to continue his shenanigans elsewhere.
You've covered your ass, and now he's someone else's problem, right?
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Actually that article made it into our second-chance pool (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 and earlier posts linked from there), which placed it on the front page, where it stayed for about 90 minutes. Its problem was that it got few upvotes.
It was also penalized by the flamewar detector (because there was a super active discussion relative to the upvotes). Had we seen that we would have taken the penalty off, but it wouldn't have made much difference because that wasn't why it fell off the front page to begin with.
Because it's a BuzzFeed story. BuzzFeed still isn't taken seriously as a real source of news even if that isn't fair any longer.
There already is a perfectly good community of startup people out there that has much more incentive to stay "pure" than a for-profit one.
Until you finally launch, submit a Show HN to have your perceived turn in the sun and it completely bombs. I can see why people look to alternatives for a chance to get feedback or traction for their product, whether it's dominated by insiders or not.
I don't visit Product Hunt but have had a product top their daily list on launch and it was helpful. The equivalent Show HN didn't really go anywhere.
> Until you finally launch, submit a Show HN to have your perceived turn in the sun and it completely bombs
We sometimes invite people to repost those or (if not too much time has gone by) we give them a second shot at the front page. There's one on the front page now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10730695.
Helping the best content to surface is hard. Anyone who knows of a good post that deserves a second chance should email us (hn@ycombinator.com). Eventually we may build support for this into the software.
I can attest. I had two submissions that were inexplicably removed from the front page (both Show HN's). I emailed to ask why and in both instances dang reinstated my submissions.
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Appreciate your work Dan, just saying that I can see why people stray from the "perfectly good" community: because when it comes time to finally have your launch moment, it's so tough on HN. And I bet it feels like a kick in the guts for people who've slaved over their app and finally talked themselves into showing people what they've been working on.
And it's tougher again without asking friends to give you a boost and if you're outside the main active timezones.
If there was a top bracket or sidebar that helped bring Show/Ask topics to the attention of all users, that would help IMO. There's also no incentive to upvote topics, no explicit messaging "Should this make HN front page for a bit?" or "Was this good?", so I bet many don't hit the arrow.
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But that can happen anywhere. The question is did you post succeed or fail because of the random luck, the merit of the post, or because of some built in bias within the system.
For example, if I tried to post my new product on Product Hunt it wouldn't do very well because I'm not allowed to post there. This blog post is arguing even if I could post there it wouldn't do well if an insider didn't promote it heavily.
On HN, anybody can post a "Show HN" and have it appear under the "Show HN" section. It is unlikely to gain any significant traffic or traction on the main site, but that is because there is a crap load of content being submitted all the time and readers have very limited attention.
I think there are a lot of smart ideas HN could do to make the front page better, and it isn't perfect. But HN wants your "Show HN" to go well, and then have you go form a company and apply to YC. A for profit community wants your post to do badly so you have to pay to get it to do well.
I had the opposite experience (illustrating that our stories are just anecdotal), but I don't blame Product Hunt at all -- I was grateful for the chance to be featured on their main page. My Show HN brought ~6K visitors in the first two days where my PH post brought <1K. I didn't know anyone, just emailed their team and... added PH to the extension (no one asked me to, just thought it'd be cool).
[1] Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9992735 [2] PH: https://www.producthunt.com/tech/kiwi-conversations
Admittedly, it was a bit humbling to see a cat "meow" soundboard quickly surpass my project on PH -- but like I said, no regrets.
Not trying to draw a comparison between traffic levels, but saying that it's very easy to submit and bomb on HN, and so drive users to an alternative as their next hope. Obviously some people submit anywhere and everywhere.
But if HN is a home to many of us, it'd be nice if it was also a viable testing ground for our new projects, feedback, etc.
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FWIW, HN is implicitly biased towards YC companies, because posts by YC founders show up in a different color to other YC founders, which is an implicit voting ring of sorts.
This may no longer be the case; it was the case a few years ago to my knowledge.
YC alumni see each other's usernames in orange. That plus the job post on the front page are the two YC-specific things that HN has. Both have been in place for a long time, and moderators try to be meticulous about not giving special treatment beyond that. (I say "try to be" because no one is the best judge of their own biases. But we do try hard, sometimes to the point of overcompensating.)
I don't think the colored usernames affect voting ring activity much. YC alumni and startups certainly are not exempt from the penalties we put on such activity, and frequently get hit by them. The first thing we always tell YC founders is not to solicit upvotes for posts because that backfires.
Even if there is no upvote requesting, this does bias YC founders to upvote other founders' posts, when they organically check the front page.
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I'm pretty sure that the only privileged positions YC holds on HN today are the top-left link and the job posts that are not eligible for votes or comments.
And writing the algorithms. And setting policies. And employing the moderator. And ...
Whether this privileged position leads to different treatment for YC companies is a different question -- as Dan says, they try not to be biased and potentially even overcompensate. Still, the privileged position is certainly there.
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The author handles show up in a different color to other YC founders. That's another benefit.
Reminds me: Check the "show" (hacker news) link on the main menu more often.
HN is equally rigged. The mods regularly change headlines, remove posts, and allow YC companies to post on the front page.
1. Headlines are changed to match the article verbatim, or if the article is linkbait, the title is changed to nonlinkbait (the latter might be more frequent case from your submission history)
2. Again, users flag. Rarely moderators remove posts other than that.
3. Those are job ads, which have a set decay time and always start at #6.
I think you're off on 2 and 3 - although I only have anecdata to make me believe so.
On point 2: I've often found posts which are gaining traction on the homepage which do not subscribe to the 'scale fast'-centric belief system of YC are pulled. Most recently this one by DHH:
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3972-reconsider
3. They're not all job ads. Stripe updates their API and it goes straight to #1? Come on...
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If you look at HN ranking trackers then you'll see there are definitely artificial adjustments to the rankings of articles. Mostly that is downwards but sometimes upwards too.
HN is mostly fair, but don't trick yourself into believing it is completely fair.
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Ya - I think #1 is crap. If it gets upvoted then let it stay. Let the people decide what they want - not one person. IF that's the case, just get rid of upvoting completely and make this all about the mods.
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This shouldn't be downvoted. HN is far from a meritocracy. Gamey as f*ck.
One of the biases that affects HN is the demographics. A lot of the HNers I would assume are working at big tech firms and their stories gets (unintentionally) upvoted to the front page as normalizing this feature would be quite difficult.
"eventually have to start selling you something"
I'm pretty sure they already are. See any ads on Product Hunt? Turns out the entire site is an ad. I wouldn't at all be surprised if companies like Microsoft paid PH to get on the front page.
Interesting... isn't ProductHunt a YC company?