Comment by OoTheNigerian
10 years ago
I've thought about this a bit and see where both parties are coming from.
For Kevin, due to the "trollish" behavior of Maciej during this competition, Kevin was (validly) very suspicious of Maciej's intention for participating in the program. Of course previous history of Maciej rallying against all YC stands for did not help assuage the fears :)
For Maciej, the rules are the rules. he (fairly) believes you do not have to like someone to keep your end of an agreement.
Here's my position. As this is an EXPERIMENT, YC should have taken the risk. Worst case, they would have had to kick him out of the program. But everyone will see they have been fair. Seen to be fair is a quite important.
I have "clashed" with Maciej before [1] however, i see him as some one who only has a hard bark and will be quite cook in person or once you know him. Dont't be too worried Kevin.
Of course, your house your rules. But still..
I hope YC can rescind and take Pinboard in (I know... I know..:).
[1] http://oonwoye.com/2011/03/09/maciej-of-pinboard-in-nigerian...
For Maciej, the rules are the rules. he (fairly) believes you do not have to like someone to keep your end of an agreement.
Except that he's inventing rules ("whoever gets the most votes wins $20,000!") which were explicitly not there, while ignoring other rules ("Can I ask people to upvote my submission? No.").
Fair enough.
But like someone said re: raising money from VC (was it PG?) don't listen to the reason, listen to the answer.
Kevin is uncomfortable with Maciej and took his decision based on that. As it would not seem politically connect to give that as his reason, he began looking for "good reasons" to justify it.
Is this conflict that can keep dividing us worth the 20k to YC? I would guess no.
They could and should sort this out. Kevin should understand that these HN YCF coys "belong to the community". If Maciej goes in and try to mess it up the community will (as my people say) "treat his fuck up".
Kevin is uncomfortable with Maciej and took his decision based on that. As it would not seem politically connect to give that as his reason, he began looking for "good reasons" to justify it.
My interpretation of events is rather different: Maciej cheated and got caught, but Dan and/or Kevin were concerned about the reaction if the submission which received the most votes was excluded based on the vote-rigging alone; so they went out of their way to try to find a way to include him anyway.
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Apologies - as stated elsewhere, "Can I ask people to upvote my submission? No." was never a written rule. Perhaps it was intended to be implied by virtue of this being HN and voting rings being frowned upon, but this is decidedly not the same situation as any other HN submission.
The /specific/ rule here should have been made clearer.
It's an explicit rule of HN, and from the start this was explained as "let's see which startups HN would pick". Things can always be clearer, but I really don't think there was much ambiguity here.
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Except that he multiple times, even in this thread, has shown that he only wanted the money and not be a part og YC. So it's really on him.