[ig1]

HN has been going downhill for a long time; while I think the YC team know this it's not something that they have had time to try and improve.

Voting rigging is the norm, companies flag posts about their competitors, there's zero transparency about moderation or flagging. The community has become a lot more negative, less supportive and less startupy.

There have been a number of attempts to build HN clones/rivals but generally the people creating them have focused on the technology rather than the community which is the important thing. USV is someone who could potentially build a great community and we should applaud them for trying.

[fredwilson]

we are not trying to compete with HN. We use it every day and find it invaluable.

what we are trying to do is open up our link sharing to the public so everyone can see what we are thinking about, reading, and discussing

and while doing that, we thought it would be great to let others do the same

i did give PG a preview of this about a month ago in case he was upset about it. he replied to me and did not seem to be

[ig1]

That's why you're more likely to attract HN users than the sites which are trying to compete directly :)

HN used to have a lot more in-depth "AskHNs" before Quora came along. Quora never tried to compete with HN, but rather it solved the problem that people were using HN for.

Plenty of people who use HN want curated startup content and intelligent discussion and will go wherever that's found.

In any-case more high-quality startup communities are good for everyone (YC, VCs, founders, etc.) so I don't think that competition is likely to be a significant issue for anyone.

[seferphier]

It would be useful if someone can tag the topics.

HN is useful to see what is hot. Hot does not mean it is relevant to all of us. If I am raising money, I would be interested in topics tagged to raising money - the fact that you (fred wilson) posted, up voted, commented the topic is a good signal that topic is relevant.

I also like the idea of commenting system that rapgenius and medium deploys. I believe that the idea of seeing the most up voted comment is broken. You might have something to say on a particular sentence in fund raising article- I'm interested to see that. Others may have interesting things to say about other sentences. If USV can pull content online and allow people to comment each sentence, I believe this would really add value to our community.

[minimaxir]

USV does have a tag system on the full body of the post submission.

[neurotech1]

Will you be releasing the core engine for other niche discussion sites? HealthTech and neuroscience come to mind.

[alexanderpease]

yes, we're considering open sourcing all of the code, if that's what you mean

in general we're very pro-open source