I can tell you my personal reasoning: it's a risk mitigation. There are weird long-tail scenarios (unlikely, but impactful if they did happen) under which HN might need to be spun out from YC. In such a case we'd need a different domain name and this is the only one that makes sense for that.
To be clear, it would be bad if HN had to split off from YC - bad for HN, bad for YC, bad for the community here. The feedback loops between HN and YC are complex, rich, and vital. So there's no plan ever to do that, but I still want the fallback just in case. I don't see why HN (and YC) shouldn't exist for a long time, and this is a long-time-frame sort of move.
In the meantime, it would be silly to let hackernews.com lie fallow, hence the redirection.
> To be clear, it would be bad if HN had to split off from YC - bad for HN, bad for YC, bad for the community here.
To be clear, it would be extremely good for the community if YC and HN were not the same company. The conflict of interest is stark and a violation of every tenet of journalism. I cant tell if you're purposely lying for the sake of profit motive or just very ignorant of the history and foundation of journalism.
I've never, ever before seen someone claim that a conflict of interest was "good for the community"!
The site is literally called Hacker News. The conflict of interest of a venture capital firm running a "news" site is not even a grey area of ethical violations. It's clearly problematic, and your refusal to even acknowledge it is a great example of how the contents of this site are highly untrustworthy.
You're misinterpreting the word "news" in the name to mean the same thing as journalism / news reporting, which HN plainly is not. It's a place where readers post and discuss links they find interesting. Sometimes those are articles from news publications, sometimes they're blog posts, sometimes they're a lot of things. HN is a conversation place—an online watercooler, basically. That's not a journalistic operation. If anything it's more of an entertainment site.
There's certainly a conversation to be had about how we manage YC's interests vis-à-vis community interests—I've discussed that with many users over the years [1, 2], the principles have been well-established for a long time, and I'm always happy to explain more. But not on the basis of a giant non sequitur!
> You're misinterpreting the word "news" in the name to mean the same thing as journalism / news reporting
That's laughable, you don't get to redefine "news". It's right there in the name. If this place was honest, it would be called yc-announcements.com or something with transparency as to the goals of the site's owners.
You're really trying to dodge this, but again, it's cut and dry. Here I'll help you and any reader that actually want to learn about the media's responsibility to not hold conflicts of interest:
To be clear, it would be bad if HN had to split off from YC - bad for HN, bad for YC, bad for the community here. The feedback loops between HN and YC are complex, rich, and vital. So there's no plan ever to do that, but I still want the fallback just in case. I don't see why HN (and YC) shouldn't exist for a long time, and this is a long-time-frame sort of move.
In the meantime, it would be silly to let hackernews.com lie fallow, hence the redirection.