[garganzol]

3% is good but fairly common conversion rate for an ad. Not really groundbreaking nor newsworthy.

But why it's on HN then? The answer - you are the product and HN is a marketplace. This makes HN kind of spoiled place to be at, as it amplifies the illusion of "good things" you "must have" or "participate in".

I really miss the golden era of BYTE magazine in the 80s. That was a classy act. But what we have now is a noisy reactor, where nearly everything is worthless but fuels illusion and false hopes. We give in without even considering an evident fact that we are being manipulated for cheap.

Yes, I may sound too dark, but then let's not call HN "a community". This a commercial enterprise with its own interests under the hood. Not the neutral place for intellectual discussions as it tries to appear.

[davidrusu]

3% conversion on a product that costs $20k is normal? I don't think so.

As to your cynical meta-analysis, these people are doing something really difficult. I'm very happy to celebrate with them in any of their little victories, good on them! I hope to see more from them in the future

[harrisonjackson]

They are also a YC company so naturally they'd post and promote their product and growth here.

[perspicace]

Smartest comment I’ve read in a while.

[marban]

I hope you've never visited Producthunt ;) Clap

[d33lio]

More people NEED this sentiment.

I kid you not, the last time I accidentally visited Product Hunt there was literally an app on the front page intended for the sole purpose of "mapping where you've cried". This type of Indie Hackers (as much as it saddens me to say) hype noise is nothing but counter-productive to "helping" side project hackers or aspiring founders.

[petercooper]

Maybe this app currently doing very well on the iOS App Store will cheer you up? ;-) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/poop-map-pin-and-track/id13032...

[d33lio]

:) At least this app has some utility!

[galaxyLogic]

How does HN make money?

[mattashii]

Technically, HN doesn't make money.

Specifically, HN is owned and funded by YCombinator.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, in section "What's the relationship between YC and HN?"

[galaxyLogic]

Good to know. So what is the reason that yCombinator maintains and curates HN? It must cost them money even if it does not make them money. So why do they do it? Is it just good publicity?

Contrast this to Reddit. It is a big company with rather similar product, which is its only product and which makes them a lot of money I believe. How can YCombinator offer a similar product for free?

[mattashii]

Reasons I can think of (unrelated to YC/HN though):

Fostering a community of tech-savy people interested in the latest technologies increases their brand size. HN is also a place where YC-related companies can advertise to and hire like-minded people. This in turn would increase the chances for those companies to succeed.

Regarding costs: I believe this site is hosted on one somewhat beefy machine, maybe two for redundancy. Compared to reddit, this site is (I believe) comparable to one active subreddit (Reddit has 100s of those), without image or video support. It has a rather simple domain model, only marginal styling, and has generally only a low overhead per page loaded, making it a rather lightweight application for the amount of traffic it receives.

Also, if you're interested, (parts of) the sources of HN are available here[0], it's a rather lightweight server in a dialect of Lisp.

[0] https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/tree/master/apps/news

[threeseed]

> So what is the reason that yCombinator maintains and curates HN?

1) Dealflow. People start with HN then learn about PG/YC. HN is also free and ad-less and so there is a lot of goodwill.

2) Promotion. It's a great value-add for YC companies to be able to use HN to find talent, promote their products etc.

[thrwn_frthr_awy]

HN is marketing for YC.