Comment by borski
10 years ago
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. :)
> However, the reasoning for that is that we want the HN community to decide on what's interesting and gets on the front page.
Exactly the same reasoning applied to deciding what's interesting and gets funded. I'm surprised this is even a question. If we had changed that rule, HN users would have skinned us alive.
Saying that "interviewing and evaluating will be done in regular HN threads" meant that the regular HN thread rules applied. We did change one of those—from "be civil" to "be nice", which by the way people did a pretty good job of—and I explained that change at length in the original post.
If you read through the comments in that original thread you'll see that a lot of them had to do with people's concerns about gaming of the voting system, which is one of the most common things that comes up here, and my answers were all about reassuring them that we'd watch for it and disqualify applications if we found it.
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