Comment by cperciva
10 years ago
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.
Even on tilt the way you are right now, you know this isn't true, and that this was a very slimy comment to have written. I'm surprised.
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Dude, it has nothing to do with him cheating.
It has more to do with the fact that he called pg a "weenis" years ago, and openly criticizes YC and SV culture in general.
The rejection was basically "sry, but you aren't quite the culture fit we're looking for". Which is fine, YCF can fund whomever they want, it's their money and their prerogative.
But here's the rub.
The way I see it, the biggest irony of the whole experiment is that it was probably meant to draw non-traditional founders, because of the pseudonymous nature of HN. But in the end, biases still prevailed. Which is why hiring/funding in SV is beyond broken, as this experiment has proven empirically.
This thread is the embodiment of all the diversity problems that tech has, the root node if you will. When the decision comes down to arbitrary "gut feeling" vs. the best (candidate|founder), then you know there's a problem.
If you can't see that, then...I'm not exactly sure what to tell you. Spend more time in the Valley?
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.
don't forget - a true "growth hacker" only needs the thinnest veneer of ambiguity to really go to town.
I think the biggest shame is that under the guise of an experiment they had the opportunity to "really disrupt" themselves and "change the face of" ...money.. giving...
What hashtag should I use to support the twitter campaign to get Maciej into a program that he probably shouldn't be under which we're discussing on a message board... UGH! crashing under the meta-overload...
Respectfully, I still have to disagree here. Of course it's an explicit rule of HN - that has always been clear. However, the reasoning for that is that we want the HN community to decide on what's interesting and gets on the front page. Yes, that's simplified, but true at a high level.
But this was not just another HN submission. This had nothing to do with 'keeping the front page interesting'. This had to do with allowing HN to "democratically" elect companies they thought were best to fund. A candidate company asking its supporters to...support them does not only seem obvious, but very different from HN trying to keep the front page clean.
If you disagree that they are different forms of using HN and not the same spirit of submission, I'm not sure we'll be able to agree here, which is also totally fine, of course. :)
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