Hacker News is a long-running, open, inclusive startup community that is subsidized by a related business, doesn't sell anything, and has proven time and again to do things good for the entire startup community.
Product Hunt is a new, closed, exclusive startup community run by a for-profit company that will eventually have to start selling you something.
Not sure why people complain about PH so much... just don't use it. There already is a perfectly good community of startup people out there that has much more incentive to stay "pure" than a for-profit one. Sure, HN isn't perfect, but fundamentally it is always going to be better than any for-profit communities.
(And also this obligatory comment: If you want to build a successful company, stop wasting your time browsing startup communities and spend your time talking with users and building your product)
Stripe insiders have been leaking sales numbers and fraud numbers of stripe merchants to the press lately. (Without permission from the merchants).
None of those articles have been successful on Hacker News, despite the fact that they are materially important to many of our businesses. (When and why are businesses metrics and Stripe support emails leaked to the press? Was that against company policy? Has the issue that caused it been addressed?)
(Stripe's CEO here.) It is emphatically against our policy. The employee involved was identified before the article was published and they no longer work at Stripe.
My guess would be they are covering their bases legally.
I have heard several stories from small business owners who fire an employee who was stealing or committing some other crime, but they don't actively tell anyone who calls for a reference because they don't want to open themselves up to legal issues.
Even if Stripe can prove that the person did this, potential lawsuits could be incredibly distracting and expensive.
Actually that article made it into our second-chance pool (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 and earlier posts linked from there), which placed it on the front page, where it stayed for about 90 minutes. Its problem was that it got few upvotes.
It was also penalized by the flamewar detector (because there was a super active discussion relative to the upvotes). Had we seen that we would have taken the penalty off, but it wouldn't have made much difference because that wasn't why it fell off the front page to begin with.
There already is a perfectly good community of startup people out there that has much more incentive to stay "pure" than a for-profit one.
Until you finally launch, submit a Show HN to have your perceived turn in the sun and it completely bombs. I can see why people look to alternatives for a chance to get feedback or traction for their product, whether it's dominated by insiders or not.
I don't visit Product Hunt but have had a product top their daily list on launch and it was helpful. The equivalent Show HN didn't really go anywhere.
> Until you finally launch, submit a Show HN to have your perceived turn in the sun and it completely bombs
We sometimes invite people to repost those or (if not too much time has gone by) we give them a second shot at the front page. There's one on the front page now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10730695.
Helping the best content to surface is hard. Anyone who knows of a good post that deserves a second chance should email us (hn@ycombinator.com). Eventually we may build support for this into the software.
I can attest. I had two submissions that were inexplicably removed from the front page (both Show HN's). I emailed to ask why and in both instances dang reinstated my submissions.
As dang said, 1st time was due to false positive on the ring detector. He just asked me honor system style. That was cool, but even cooler, when it was reinstated kevin, YC partner, commented with some practical/usable feedback. This was a thing kevin and dang coordinated on a couple Fridays, and I hope they continue or even expand that effort for the community.
The 2nd time I think it was a flagging, maybe people didn't agree it should have been a Show HN.
Appreciate your work Dan, just saying that I can see why people stray from the "perfectly good" community: because when it comes time to finally have your launch moment, it's so tough on HN. And I bet it feels like a kick in the guts for people who've slaved over their app and finally talked themselves into showing people what they've been working on.
And it's tougher again without asking friends to give you a boost and if you're outside the main active timezones.
If there was a top bracket or sidebar that helped bring Show/Ask topics to the attention of all users, that would help IMO. There's also no incentive to upvote topics, no explicit messaging "Should this make HN front page for a bit?" or "Was this good?", so I bet many don't hit the arrow.
There could be a lot of different reasons why your "Show HN" wasn't successful. Applying that to every "Show HN" is not correct.
My experience was very different from yours. Stayed on the front page 16 hours, spot #5 for 5 hours (iirc). Similar to you, I had to work myself up to even submit it. I procrastinated 2 hours before posting. Only told 1 friend I had posted. However, I'd consider mine very successful. I did not expect it to be, because if I had, I would have increased the Digital Ocean droplet and my server would not have crashed. Of the ~5 hours I was at spot #5, my server was down almost 3 hours between 3 different crashes.
I say this on reddit often, between Show HN and PH, people give PH way too much credit. Show HN is a great launching platform, just remember who the audience is.
There are countless Show HNs that never make the front page. I'd guess far more don't make it than do. And I think the average Show HN is far better than the average HN submission.
But that can happen anywhere. The question is did you post succeed or fail because of the random luck, the merit of the post, or because of some built in bias within the system.
For example, if I tried to post my new product on Product Hunt it wouldn't do very well because I'm not allowed to post there. This blog post is arguing even if I could post there it wouldn't do well if an insider didn't promote it heavily.
On HN, anybody can post a "Show HN" and have it appear under the "Show HN" section. It is unlikely to gain any significant traffic or traction on the main site, but that is because there is a crap load of content being submitted all the time and readers have very limited attention.
I think there are a lot of smart ideas HN could do to make the front page better, and it isn't perfect. But HN wants your "Show HN" to go well, and then have you go form a company and apply to YC. A for profit community wants your post to do badly so you have to pay to get it to do well.
I had the opposite experience (illustrating that our stories are just anecdotal), but I don't blame Product Hunt at all -- I was grateful for the chance to be featured on their main page. My Show HN brought ~6K visitors in the first two days where my PH post brought <1K. I didn't know anyone, just emailed their team and... added PH to the extension (no one asked me to, just thought it'd be cool).
Not trying to draw a comparison between traffic levels, but saying that it's very easy to submit and bomb on HN, and so drive users to an alternative as their next hope. Obviously some people submit anywhere and everywhere.
But if HN is a home to many of us, it'd be nice if it was also a viable testing ground for our new projects, feedback, etc.
It wasn't just traffic: it was the feedback. I got over 50 comments on HN on about 55 votes. on PH, I got 3 comments on about 35 votes. If HN is known as being too negative, I find PH comments come from almost forced optimism -- people are too cautious with what they say at the expense of constructive feedback.
FWIW, HN is implicitly biased towards YC companies, because posts by YC founders show up in a different color to other YC founders, which is an implicit voting ring of sorts.
This may no longer be the case; it was the case a few years ago to my knowledge.
YC alumni see each other's usernames in orange. That plus the job post on the front page are the two YC-specific things that HN has. Both have been in place for a long time, and moderators try to be meticulous about not giving special treatment beyond that. (I say "try to be" because no one is the best judge of their own biases. But we do try hard, sometimes to the point of overcompensating.)
I don't think the colored usernames affect voting ring activity much. YC alumni and startups certainly are not exempt from the penalties we put on such activity, and frequently get hit by them. The first thing we always tell YC founders is not to solicit upvotes for posts because that backfires.
Maybe, but I'm pretty sure the effect is small. For example, there aren't any posts by YC founders on the front page right now. And votes by YC founders mostly wouldn't be enough to move a story in ways that would escape the ring detector.
I'm pretty sure that the only privileged positions YC holds on HN today are the top-left link and the job posts that are not eligible for votes or comments.
And writing the algorithms. And setting policies. And employing the moderator. And ...
Whether this privileged position leads to different treatment for YC companies is a different question -- as Dan says, they try not to be biased and potentially even overcompensate. Still, the privileged position is certainly there.
You're exactly right—it's a privileged position, and a delicate one. Without the trust and the interest of the community, HN wouldn't be worth much, so those are the two things we care about most.
1. Headlines are changed to match the article verbatim, or if the article is linkbait, the title is changed to nonlinkbait (the latter might be more frequent case from your submission history)
2. Again, users flag. Rarely moderators remove posts other than that.
3. Those are job ads, which have a set decay time and always start at #6.
I think you're off on 2 and 3 - although I only have anecdata to make me believe so.
On point 2: I've often found posts which are gaining traction on the homepage which do not subscribe to the 'scale fast'-centric belief system of YC are pulled. Most recently this one by DHH:
3. Stripe is a rather large company that happens to be a YC company. Keep in mind that Product Hunt is YC too and you're commenting on a negative article about it currently ranked at #4 on the front page.
I didn't see either version of the article and I visit HN several times throughout the day. You'd think an article with such a high vote count and low comment count would stick around much longer than it did - there's even mention of its amazing disappearing act in the comments.
2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page.
3. There are plenty of rather large companies that don't get as much attention here as Stripe does (I don't have anything against Stripe btw, just using them as an example in this case).
If HN pulled this article it would be pretty damning on the part of YC. The placement of this article in question does not disprove my previous points.
FWIW, I've enjoyed relatively decent success from my own product launches on HN.
EDIT: re: medium - I mistook you the first time. Apologies. My point still stands re: posts being pulled.
> 2. I don't see what its performance on Medium has to do with it. My point is that it was a perfectly good article pulled from the front page.
Oh come on now, you've been here long enough to know that HN attempts to avoid duplicates within days of each other. Of course that one was pulled when the other post of the same content had a huge upvote count and lively discussion.
If you look at the submission history for signalvnoise.com you'll see that this article was submitted many times and most of them were marked as duplicates by users (including me, probably, at least I remember noticing how often it was submitted), often with a link to the highly-voted post.
If you want a response to this and you don't see one here in the next few hours (I'll try, but can't right now), you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. The short version is that you're partly right on #2 but probably less than you think, and definitely not on #3.
Edit: ok, here you go. Long, but hard to make shorter.
Here are all the things that can make a post fall in rank: user flags, software penalties (for voting rings, flamewars, etc.), and moderator downweights. All try to optimize HN for the core value of the site—intellectual curiosity—and all are mechanisms to countervail the upvoting system in some way. Why? Because pure upvoting optimizes for other things than intellectual curiosity, such as outrage, gossip, and gaming the system.
Think of HN like a flower garden. The flowers are stories that gratify intellectual curiosity, and to have these we must protect the garden against weeds, rabbits, motor vehicles, and other things that otherwise would soon take over.
User flags and software take care of much, but not all, so moderation is needed. (We'd love to make it not be needed, but that's a hard problem.) Our criteria for downweighting come from a general sense of what attracts upvotes for reasons other than intellectual interest. It's not about what we personally believe, or have a vested interest in, or even what we happen to be interested in ourselves, with the possible exception of APL.
When we downweight, we try to use a light touch. When you see a story plummet off the front page, it probably wasn't moderators who did that (or there was a clear-cut reason, such as a duplicate). In judgment call cases, we're more likely to make a story go from #1 to #4. It's all about balance.
You may reply that "a general sense" is hopelessly subjective, and I'd have to agree, yet it's not as subjective as you might think. For example, we wouldn't downweight a substantive article about startups just because it disagreed with YC's philosophy. We might do so if it included a lot of tricks to stir up controversy. Do you see the difference? The latter is procedural; not much different than editing linkbait out of titles. If you do this job across tens of thousands of stories, and you're conscious of the obvious biases, you can mostly guard against them, especially since the same patterns come up over and over.
Not sure if I've succeeded here in getting across the gist of what we do, but I hope it helps a bit.
As for #3, that's an easy one. We don't give YC startups extra favor when it comes to boosting stories. If a Stripe API went to #1, that was because the community heavily upvoted it. We also are less likely, not more, to downweight stories when they are critical about a YC startup, such as the thread we're currently commenting in.
Hmm, no idea. But we don't see a lot of flag brigading on HN, and there aren't that many posts in that list, so I guess the effect is minimal?
A surprising thing about HN is that the flagging system works remarkably well compared to the voting system. You'd think (well, I'd have thought) that they wouldn't be so different, but they are.
If you look at HN ranking trackers then you'll see there are definitely artificial adjustments to the rankings of articles. Mostly that is downwards but sometimes upwards too.
HN is mostly fair, but don't trick yourself into believing it is completely fair.
There are factors beyond naive weightings, as well. I remember reading somewhere that if a thread becomes too heated or turns into a flamewar, the mods have the ability to suppress it in the rankings artificially to let it cool off. That functionality makes sense, but wouldn't be easily identified in a third-party tracker.
A lot of comments here seem to be assigning moderation as bias.
Ya - I think #1 is crap. If it gets upvoted then let it stay. Let the people decide what they want - not one person. IF that's the case, just get rid of upvoting completely and make this all about the mods.
I understand the logic there, but it would mean the end of HN, because intellectual curiosity is not the most powerful curiosity, even among intellectually-oriented people.
One of the biases that affects HN is the demographics. A lot of the HNers I would assume are working at big tech firms and their stories gets (unintentionally) upvoted to the front page as normalizing this feature would be quite difficult.
I'm pretty sure they already are. See any ads on Product Hunt? Turns out the entire site is an ad. I wouldn't at all be surprised if companies like Microsoft paid PH to get on the front page.
Product Hunt is a new, closed, exclusive startup community run by a for-profit company that will eventually have to start selling you something.
Not sure why people complain about PH so much... just don't use it. There already is a perfectly good community of startup people out there that has much more incentive to stay "pure" than a for-profit one. Sure, HN isn't perfect, but fundamentally it is always going to be better than any for-profit communities.
(And also this obligatory comment: If you want to build a successful company, stop wasting your time browsing startup communities and spend your time talking with users and building your product)