Comment by jsc1986
5 years ago
Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?
The point is not that they have direct control over YC or HN, it's that they have massive indirect control over the organization and have done a wizard's job of making themselves untouchable in the media.
Some context: I'm a former (early) YC founder, and during my batch the YC team recommended that we spend time with the HN team. The HN team gave us edits on our posts, recommended the best times of day to submit, emailed us when stories about our companies hit the front page, and explained how the ranking algorithms worked (and thus we learned how to game them). And we are not the most valuable YC company ever -- so it's possible more was done for Stripe.
It's not direct influence, but rather indirect impact. So again I ask -- Did Patrick request that you write this post?
That sounds weird to me. There was no "HN team" before I started working on HN in October 2012 - just pg, and no one would have referred to him as "the HN team".
The HN team originates in April 2014, when I became public as a mod. (That's not early in YC btw.) In that case you're talking about me (and possibly Scott), and while I guess it's dangerous to make strong claims about some meeting I don't remember, there's no way we would have "explained how the ranking algorithms worked" in such a way that you could game HN. That's precisely what we would not have done. I've worked way too hard on that shit to blab about it and see all that sand run through my fingers.
I also doubt that we'd have told you "the best times of day to submit"—people ask us that all the time and the stock answer is we have no idea, there are all sorts of dodgy analyses out there, and you can take your pick.
As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, yes—I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.
Perhaps it was just our batch, but there was a long discussion about how the algo worked amongst founders. Admittedly, you + Scott were not there. Some partners were and the discussion was seeded by them, but I don't remember how much they contributed vs. others in the group.
Edit: Apologies if this came off as accusatory. Was trying to make the point that they don't have control of the media, but instead are just flawless in their use of it.
In that case it was the blind leading the blind. The advice that founders give each other about how to game HN routinely backfires. Unfortunately, people are so conditioned to conflate "feels like it should work" with "actually works", that no matter how much we repeat the contrary it seems to have little effect.
Thanks for the reply - you had me wondering for a minute what the hell I wasn't remembering.
3 replies →
That's not really the "HN team," though. What you're describing that the partners did is scummy, but makes sense when you realize that partners and dang have effectively an adversarial relationship when it comes to the quality of HN. People invested in you have strong reason to try and ensure your popularity here; they very well could have just tried throwing tips at you to get you to manipulate the site better.
Most people can't stare at the News source for an hour straight without getting a headache, let alone a rich investor type. They wouldn't find much of value in what's been publicly released of it, anyway (the released source is ancient and includes little as far as quality control goes).
If what you're saying is based in truth, you were probably just getting tips from someone with a strong financial incentive to have brute forced their way into understanding the site the manual way (throwing posts at it) rather than someone who had any genuine inside knowledge.
I can confirm that dang is a massive help to non-YC founders posting on HN.
He’s helped me a couple of times to make my posts more appealing to readers, providing great insight into what HN readers are looking for.
Same here.
I launched a company that has grown into a mild success because of dang giving it another chance and it making the front page.
Me too -- dang has given me valuable feedback about what kinds of things to post, and how to focus and frame posts so people will find them useful and interesting, how to save and respect people's time, and how not to overwhelm or tire people out so much. Much of that advice applies to writing and life in general, not just posting to HN! And he's even done kind favors like correcting an embarrassing typo I made in quote of a transcript that accidentally inverted the meaning of what the person was trying to say, when I only noticed it after the paint dried.
+1000 same here
dang rules
> As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.
Fact: dang's helped me a few times with this when I've goofed with my own comments, and as best as I can tell, I'm not a founder of any kind.
dang offered me to do the same thing for my, now closed, start-up.
that only makes it more likely they're helping more important people more frequently and to a greater degree.
12 replies →
FWIW dang was extremely helpful when I had an issue. He worked with me to resolve it, rather than take arbitrary executive action. I don’t credit any accusation of dang playing favourites to YC founders. Basically, there is no level of assistance higher than what I received, therefore there is no way someone is getting preferential treatment. There’s simply no more that could’ve been done.
Note: I wasn’t completely happy with the outcome at the time, but I respected the decision. I hindsight I agree with it too.
Dang. Please remove the shadowban from my account so I can post anonymously.
Are you planning to sell your Stripe equity at IPO next year, or wait a week for the IPO pop? I think I might actually wait a couple months
I don't have any Stripe equity, and it's not ok to attack other users on HN—not even a moderator.
I'm also a YC founder of a (smaller, but top ~100 in terms of valuation) YC company. I don't know what your experience was like with Stripe, but the notion that Patrick has some unduly amount of power to exercise over HN and YC immediately flags to me as untrue. I've been on the receiving end of a lot of HN criticism, and I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.
Edits on your posts, recommending the best times of day to submit, explaining how HN algorithms work broadly, are accessible to everyone; these are discussed frequently on HN, and were all accessible to me even before I was a YC founder. I'm also certain the HN team wouldn't need to email Patrick about something like this being on the front page; when my company (~150 employees) is on the front page I get a bunch of messages about it from all sorts of different angles; certainly many of the thousands of Stripe employees use HN and would be capable of sending a Slack or text.
To me it seems the notion that Patrick has "indirect control" over parts of HN is a longer way of saying he has respect. I think Patrick may be the most universally respected founder in Silicon Valley, and perhaps doubly so amongst engineers. I am not surprised at all that people upvote his comments, as he's both the person speaking from authority, and they're usually well reasoned - I use them as a model for how to respond well (something I have not always done).
I'm not saying you're being untrue about your experience (and I don't think OP was being untrue about theirs), but the notion that Patrick as at the helm of an evil empire stealing from companies and manipulating folks to keep it quiet just feels farcically different from reality across the dozens of Stripe and YC/HN touch points I have.
> I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.
Consider [1] which was flagged dead. It was ~10 years ago, so I could be wrong, but I believe there was a follow-up meta "Ask HN" where someone asked why it was flagged (I can't find it), and I __believe__ PG said something along the lines that he didn't find the original constructive, hence flagging it dead. Top comment on the non-constructive OP was from spolsky with some insightful information on job postings...
Definitely seemed like going above and beyond to tip the scale in YC founder's favor.
Edit: found the followup/meta [2] (I was wrong, no official explanation was given, sorry about that).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2707385
I think hn moderation has probably changed in the last 10 years. For one thing, the set of moderators has entirely changed since then.
> I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.
This [0] story criticising Gitlab resurfaced on a day of Gitlab IPO and quickly disappeared from the frontpage within an hour or so.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28857073
I'm assuming this occurred because HN's "flame detector" triggered (Think it has something to do with upvotes vs comments).
Lambda School must also not be an evil empire then huh?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
I think you might be getting conspiratorial about this. Here's my take on reading the comment thread. I am an outsider peering in - no connection to the companies etc.
1. Your single experience doesn't represent a pattern of behavior - and dang comment's certainly corrected some of your original inaccuracies in your comments. If you can attribute many cases of this happening then maybe it represents a pattern of behavior.
2. Patrick might have different relationships depending where you are on the power curve of importance to them (competitor, investor, partner, etc) - which could explain the discrepancy between your experience + barmstrong. There are also a host of other possibilities.
3. In terms of barmstrong's positive comments does he have an investment in square either personally or through his company, any partnership with the organization, or is personally friends with Patrick. Any of those would bias his comments in favor. He might have a great relationship with Patrick.
At the end of the day - I'm not sure where this goes. It comes across like a strong personal attack from a bad situation that is getting a lot of response on HN.
No he did not. We didn’t even discuss it.
I don’t think the question was whether you two actually talked but rather if there is any conflict of interest or other incentives that fueled the defense. You’ve had a particularly divisive approach towards people (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/10/08/60-emp... ) and so it’s reasonable to assume any of your public statements might not be completely accurate or forthcoming or easy to take at face value. That of course might not be intentional though!
> Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?
Is a pretty direct question and barmstrong gave a direct answer. It's possible that temp7536 and barmstrong simply had different experiences with Patrick.
It seems to me that barmstrong wanted to share their experience.
1 reply →
> You’ve had a particularly divisive approach towards people (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/10/08/60-emp... )
Unless you have more information than I do, I really don't understand how that is an example of divisiveness. Picking sides is a great way of being divisive.
If they picked a side, people would've also left the company because they disagreed with the side that was picked. Which would mean that the company culture will become that side. People who think differently will be discouraged to join the company because they don't want to work for a company with stand points they disagree with. A company like that will possibly end up blind to whatever the 'other side' thinks. That's how you end up with Juicero.
I don't think every organization should be apolitical by default. But there really is a point to being apolitical as an organization, especially in the Crypto market, since there are so many different reasons for people supporting Crypto, any political stand point might cause you to lose customers.
It looks like the question actually was whether they talked. It was asked two ways in the same comment:
- “Did Patrick request that you write this post?”
- “Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?”
> And we are not the most valuable YC company ever -- so it's possible more was done for Stripe.
Ah yes, surely the reason you didn't create the most valuable YC company ever is because more was done for Stripe.