Comment by thaumaturgy
10 years ago
> > honest HN community members who voted for him in good faith?
> How many such people exist?
raises hand
Hi, my account is 3000 days old today, only a little less old than your own. I went back and checked and it turns out that I didn't vote for Pinboard, but that's largely because I hadn't been active on HN in quite a while and I didn't think it was necessary. I did voice support for Maciej in the comments there.
I genuinely wanted to see him go through the program ("like a bowling ball through a python"), and not just for entertainment purposes. I think it would have been a valuable cross-pollination for everyone involved.
I've generally felt that HN -- and to a greater degree, YC -- aren't particularly welcoming towards people like me. I got fed up enough that I wrote a news reader to mine HN for articles just so that I wouldn't be tempted to visit HN as often, and when that broke a while back, I never bothered to fix it. Literally the only reason I'm here now is because Maciej mentioned it on his Twitter account. I've always been an outsider here. Seeing YC accept another, more successful outsider would have been nice.
This fiasco has all the scent of cliqueish hostility towards Maciej, you have been non-stop and relentlessly accusing him of being a troll (and you're smart enough to know better than to claim to know someone's psychology better than they do over the internet), and the results stink like a US election.
raises hand
To be clear, I'm not saying that such people do not exist. I'm saying that there's no effective way to estimate their number.
Sure there is. The way has been outlined by `beeboop' and `killwhitey' in this thread, and subsequently by myself. The question have not been answered: if the concern is vote-brigading then the correct result can be determined by looking at accounts that are more than 30 days old.
If the outcome is the same then the twitter-promoting explanation is simply a smokescreen.
There are plenty of people with old accounts who would not have voted for pinboard -- or, for that matter, even been aware that there was a poll happening -- if he had not actively solicited votes on twitter.
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What about by the quality of the discussion in the Apply HN submission? This was (as I understood the original experiment) to be the primary mechanism for selecting finalists.
Pinboard's application had the best discussion.