Two HN Announcements

Serious question, not rhetorical:

I have noticed there appear to be artificially-bumped posts from time-to-time that relate to YC companies. Is HN providing extra clout to YC companies' PR above and beyond organic community moderation, and if so, will HN's extra autonomy in any way change that?

We definitely don't give special treatment to YC companies' stories and I'd be happy to look at links if you have any you're wondering about. But make sure you're not looking at the job ads as described in the FAQ. Those are indeed reserved for YC companies. (That is the main thing that HN gives back to YC in return for funding it.)

That very likely could be be my point of confusion. Thanks for the response.

Does HN really need that much money? Sorry for the indiscreet question.

The costs are all low except for paying people.

Any chance we can get discussion threads for those?

I think HN does have a few people working on it fulltime.

I answered that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299788.

Based on everything we know about HN it's unlikely that such threads would be any good. HN discussions are good when there's a specific story or idea to discuss.

I think one problem I that there are de facto fanclubs. For example, I'm guilty of voting almost all stories of the sites http://www.kalzumeus.com (patio11) and http://www.righto.com (kens). When I see on of them, I read them immediately because they are almost sure good and then I upvote them.

I don't have the data, but probably most programing languages have a set of users that is very interested in them. IIRC this caused a few times a false positive with the voting ring detector a few years ago.

Probably, YC has a mix off many happy alumni here and many fans, so any story about YC get many upvotes fast, and that may look like an artificial bump.

There definitely are de facto fan clubs, and it has been interesting to see them shift around over the years. I don't see this as bad for HN, unless it becomes excessive. It's great that people are passionate about these things and I hope every HN user finds something to be passionate about here.