Two HN Announcements

In light of this, what about the submissions that don't allow comments?

I've never really understood what those are in the first place, and am curious what they'll be following this statement of editorial independence. Are those advertisements dang does and will continue to pick and choose? Not that I really care, but they've always seemed a bit out of place.

Are you talking about the job ads that YC startups are allowed to post to the front page? Those are described in the FAQ.

Other than that, I think all live posts are open to comments.

Not that I am a proponent of ads or sponsored content, but a crazy experiment just occurred to me: a steeply discounted sponsored ad filter/section with the same upvote/downvote rules as the rest of the site (but still no comments). The advertiser faces the risk of wasting money by inappropriately targeting the community's interests. Potentially higher engagement because if you give users the right to express an up/down opinion, they're going to do it whether it is advertising or not, so at least they're viewing the ads. The scoring is all relative, so even if 80% of the people down vote out of principle, the better and more interesting ads will still percolate to the top.

In that case, you just might want Sam to tone down that "full editorial independence" statement. It's fine that you give special treatment to YC, but please don't claim a virtue you don't have.

I'm not sure I agree with you there. Doesn't the term "editorial independence" come from newspapers? Those always had ads.

Indeed the nice thing about the current arrangement is that the YC startup job ads are completely up-front, always work the same way, and have a fixed effect on the front page. So it doesn't affect editorial judgment at all. (Except that we try to take linkbait out of the titles and I'm surprised that no YC startup has asked us about that yet.)

I'm not talking about ads in general. I'm saying that when the only "ads" run are for the editorial outlet's parent company's investment interests, well, isn't that a bit... I dunno... incongruous with the nature of advertisement in a paper?

I understand editorial independence to mean that we make decisions based on what's best for HN and its community, not YC's immediate business interests.

I qualified that with "immediate" because an independent HN focused on intellectual curiosity is what's best for YC's business. That's the global optimum. It would be foolish to trade it away for any local one (e.g. handling a particular YC-related story differently). What makes HN valuable to YC is optimizing its value to the community. Everyone at YC knows that.

The main benefit of today's announcement is if it helps us make that clearer to others. Understandably, people sometimes take it for granted that since HN is owned by an investment business, it must directly serve that business. Those concerns won't go away, but it will be nice to be able to point to the org structure and say that's why it's set up that way.

I think it'd be interesting to see what would happen if you allowed comments on those, but it's kind of a minor thing.