[vl]

HN business model is to be marketing vehicle for Y Combinator. Y Combinator wouldn’t happen without HN since there would be no wide reach while it was still small.

Ingenuity of course is sprinkling marketing material on top of community-created content. Compare it to Joel’s approach: produce interesting content and then use your blog to promote your companies. Worked out for Joel, but it just doesn’t scale well.

Ironically it’s a bit neglected: it was unreadable on mobile devices for years, had no folding, etc. A bit of Reddit-like features would go a long way.