| I don't think HN has changed that much, but perceptions differ. Perceivers also change, though—especially over a longish time frame like a decade. I can tell you for sure that we don't run HN to "pursue YC's existing investments". We're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity [1] because that's the way to maximize HN's value for YC [2, 3]. The point is that it's in YC's business interests to run HN this way, and the argument holds no matter how cynical one wants to be about it. HN is an interesting corner case in internet economics. If we tried to optimize it for existing investments (or worse, tried to squeeze money out of it directly), its value would go down, because that would make it less interesting to the community, and HN's value comes from the interest and quality of the community. Basically: the more one tried to make money out of HN, the less it would be worth. That's interesting, no? I suppose you could say HN's value comes more from future investments, not existing ones. We can optimize HN for that by having it be as interesting as possible, so people want to continue to hang out here. (Btw, that phrase "as possible" is important. There are limits on how good or interesting a large public internet forum can ever get. But we can try.) [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [3] There are a few exceptions to this, but they're secondary, and all explained in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html |