[morinted]

There are lots of open source discussion systems, and lots of transparent ones. For whatever reason, the closed and opinionated Hacker News reached the popularity that it did. I don't mind it.

Something about the mystery and the relatively tight moderation has kept HN from becoming too off topic and silly. Do you think Hacker News has somehow avoided Eternal September?

[krapp]

>For whatever reason, the closed and opinionated Hacker News reached the popularity that it did. I don't mind it.

It being owned by a multimillion dollar VC company might have something to do with it.

[kbenson]

I'm sure that helped, especially in the beginning, but at this point I think the number of people that value it for the community and discussion far exceeds those that use it to keep abridged of YC developments.

[krapp]

Still, being seen here has value in part because of who sees you, itself in part because of the VC and startup culture behind the site. Keeping abreast of YC developments doesn't even matter - some people want to hang around the water cooler where very important people might happen to walk by.

I suspect that if this were just a tech and programming forum, it would be about as popular as a niche imageboard like lainchan.

[icebraining]

HN was already pretty popular while YC was only distributing $1M/year, back in 2010. But posting was encouraged to YC participants (IIRC), which probably did help it quite a bit.