Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3

The way this experiment was presented, the Hacker News community would be allowed to select two YC Fellowship recipients. According to the announcement, "all the interviewing and evaluating will be done in regular HN threads."

But that's not what happened here. I won the voting by a yuuuge margin, and then the vote was nullified in a vape-filled room after it became clear that Hacker News might have its own agenda, separate from YC.

Accusations of soliciting votes by tweeting the HN threads would carry weight with me if there had been any published guidelines about what kind of publicity was allowed. But rules about "vote brigading" on HN are intentionally kept secret.

People have repeatedly accused me of trolling, but I don't think it's me who just trolled you all.

I want my twenty grand.

According to the same announcement, "We can talk about this in the comments, but to answer one question I know will come up: Upvotes are an important factor but they're too brittle to rely on exclusively; doing so would encourage the wrong kind of trying to game the system."

They said from the start that votes alone would not decide the results.

But Maciej is right.

From a fairly outsider perspective, Maciej/idlewords seems to dislike SV & VC culture (for lots of reasonable reasons) and YC by extension, and is trying to joke/troll here as a form of protest or publicity; OK.

On the other side, the YC/HN guys are actually trying to do something innovative, with YC fellows which is more accessible than vanilla YC (can do remotely), and now with a community choice, which is a step in a more innovative/accessible direction again.

Surely this is a step in the right direction? If not, could someone explain why? If they are trying to make good faith steps in the right direction, and someone is trolling them (by which I mean for humor/protest, not bad intentions), isn't it fair enough to exclude that application?

Meanwhile, look at the the post Kevin Hale just wrote. It says, "We ran a poll for the top applications and the voting was so close that we decided to fund one extra startup. Here are the winners." But that's not true at all. The fact that Pinboard took more than 3x the number of votes as the 2nd place vote-getter is mentioned nowhere in Hale's message.

I respect 'dang and 'kevin both, a ton. Have always had nothing but pleasant interactions with them, and the amount of care they put towards managing this community is seemingly boundless.

With all of that said, 'idlewords is absolutely right here. The HN mods and/or YCF made a choice here not to fund Pinboard, regardless of whether HN wanted to or not. It's not really OK to say that it's an experiment where HN gets to make choices and then not support them, unless there were explicitly some bad blood or trolling occurring. Based on everything 'idlewords has posted, it would appear that he is not trolling. Sure, perhaps he has a bit of a 'let's watch the world burn' attitude, but it's not entirely clear to the rest of us that that isn't just a persona.

If I had applied for the "Apply HN" experiment, there is no way in hell I wouldn't have tweeted or asked customers to upvote - of course you would! Sure, perhaps this doesn't reflect the true nature of HN's vote, since these may or may not be regular HN users, but unless you only count users that have some age or karma, you can't prevent that. Alternatively, you can make it a stated rule that this isn't a popularity contest and thus you should not ask for votes elsewhere. That was not made clear at all - it was implied, or at least I perceived, that this was intended to be 'an experiment in democracy,' for better or worse.

I do think, if 'idlewords is truly interested in the fellowship and all of the requirements therein (Skype meetings or whatever else), that it would be good to stand by the original rules. With that said, these are investment decisions and aren't intended to be taken lightly, and obviously you guys have the final decision anyway (this was always true, no matter what HN said - you're the ones putting up the money and time).

I just think it's more 'right' if you follow along with the original plan of the experiment. Hell, maybe 'idlewords ends up getting so much value out of YCF that he becomes even more serious about Pinboard and it's the next Pinterest (no pun intended). If nothing else, YC/HN may learn something from it.

While the upvotes are an indication of support for your position, it wouldn't have accurately captured the number of people who disagreed with you (and thus supported Pinboard), since disagreement is not grounds for downvoting.

Sure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442647

P.S. I voted for Pinboard.

I certainly didn't think that saying "Please don't give money to Pinboard, I don't think Maciej will act appropriately and it will spoil any chances of following this process again" fitted into "nice". Now some people did post (generally more constructive) versions of that comment, but I refrained base on the stated policy.

There was no way to vote Pinboard down other than to just vote for the other options.

The process did not actually offer any way to determine the HN community's overall view, only that were was a large subset that wanted to fund Pinboard. That subset might be greater that the subset that specifically didn't want to fund Pinboard, but there's no evidence available to determine that.

I understand completely why the complete rulebook on how you can't and can't promote your posts isn't posted clearly on the site. Voting ring suppression is an arms race, and posting the current rules helps the vote-ringers.

But a general statement about not soliciting support for applications could have been made clearer. And, more importantly, the vote ring really had nothing to do with this. Kevin Hale didn't want Maciej in the program. That's all there was to it.

Did he want the YCF spot, or the $20k? I don't know him, but the fact that his immediate response was "I want my twenty grand" reinforces my belief that Kevin made the right decision here.

Getting into YCF even with 100 more votes than the next 3 combined is not a right. If YC doesn't feel comfortable working with him and think that he'll negatively affect the batch and the alumni network, that's their call. (Just take this thread for example, what was supposed to be a post mortem of the contest and a place to give suggestions and feedback has turned into a complaint fest).

I did somethings which the mods didn't approve of in their judgement and my application itself was disqualified (it was ranked at 5 by upvotes) but I don't feel entitled so I'm not complaining.

> Did he want the YCF spot, or the $20k? I don't know him, but the fact that his immediate response was "I want my twenty grand" reinforces my belief that Kevin made the right decision here.

I agree, Kevin made the right decision as well.

I'm sure there's others given I know specific people's position on comments I made that they could've downvoted. So, parent's claim stands but we can't know how much. Maybe worth considering modifying downvote concept to deal with this somehow in another forum as an experiment.

This might be worth dang and others factoring into the next iteration of this stuff. Some way for people to express agreement without being mean. Might be one post saying "Disagree or voting against" that they can upvote if they want opposition to be tallied. Maybe even make it stay in one spot on page so it doesn't get in way of rest of discussion.

What yall think?

Is it because you don't feel entitled? Or because there's a vast chasm of difference between "5th place" and "1st place by several miles in each of two separate races"?

I voted for pinboard... and I'm curious why Kevin decided that it wasn't in the spirit of the program.

The original announcement said:

At the end of the month, we'll rank the startups and YC will fund two. The ranking will depend both on upvotes and on the quality of discussion, similar to how the ranking of stories works. We can talk about this in the comments, but to answer one question I know will come up: Upvotes are an important factor but they're too brittle to rely on exclusively; doing so would encourage the wrong kind of trying to game the system. So we're going to gauge community interest both by upvotes and comments, and in case of doubt I'll make the final call—or better, figure out a way to put the final call to the community.

All this says is that (a) upvotes and comments will be used to rank the startups, and that (b) YC will then fund two. It doesn't say they'll use the ranking as the sole criteria. It seems obvious that an organization giving away bags of $20k will exercise some kind of discretion beforehand.

But that's not the worst, dumbest thing about this. The dumbest thing is that YC would have gotten the most benefit out of giving Maciej the money, and they let their fear and discomfort keep them from doing that.

Their money on the line, their call. I have never felt "out of the loop" because I didn't influence their investment decisions. The value I get from HN is the conversations and things I read about and learn.

I didn't think of this experiment as having fixed rules, but rather as something we'd figure out as we went along. I tried to make that clear up front: "Note that word experiment! We'll start small and figure it out as we go. But here are the initial conditions." I can see why that wasn't enough.

It occurs to me only now that "figure it out as we go" and "changing the rules" are the same thing. So yes. We changed the rules, and I'm sorry.

no rule of law -> automatic bullshit.

HN has never been a rule-driven, legalistic kind of place, and isn't going to get that way. But I've had to learn a lot about people who do feel this way and obviously have a lot to learn yet. My own temperament is very far from this; it's almost impossible for me not to read "we'll figure it out as we go" as a good, fine thing.

About that, I like the point zellyn makes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633818

"We'll change things next time based on the results of this experiment" and "We'll change things this time as we see fit and appropriate" are very different, though your initial statement can be read as implying either.

I don't even think one is better than the other - I would just be more careful about communicating which it really is, next time. You guys are free to do what you want, heh. This entire "debacle," if you can even call it that, is actually a great case study in how and why clear communication is so important. The problem wasn't the decision that was made, but rather how it was communicated.

The issue was that it wasn't clear there would be rule-changing or experimentation /during/ the experiment, rather than after the experiment.

That's not what I meant at all. This is the first time this interpretation ever occurred to me.

If that's what people thought I meant, I can certainly understand some of this thread better. But it floors me that my intent would have failed so completely to come across.

From my point of view that sentence about making it up as we go was the most important thing in the original post. It meant that we didn't have to plan a fixed set of rules: if and when something unforeseen came up, we'd adapt to it then. That's why I said "initial conditions". I'd never have proposed anything that took away our ability to adapt in the middle of this, and especially not about something so untried.

I think, at this point, the issue is that it's clear to most of us what happened, but YC is still trying to put a gloss on it.

The more you and Kevin Hale try to mitigate this, the more polarized it gets, and the meaner some commenters get about Maciej, who didn't do anything wrong. You don't have to accept Pinboard into YCF, but you have a responsibility not to let him take any of the blame for this.

Yes. I wasn't arguing against that.

"We had an idea for figuring out where we'd spend our money. We didn't like what happened so we spent it based on other criteria."

So the experiment was maybe the voting / HN selection, but they don't get to paint it as the experiment was "let's see who HN selects, then compare their outcome with traditional participants" like we were led to believe...

It gets a little more muddled with social experiments, where it's often hard to delineate an "ending point" of the experiment, and there's often real collateral damage in the process. Even with social experiments, though, you get a more accurate signal if you let them run past the point where your gut tells you it's a bad idea.

Or maybe, now that you've figured out what this experiment is supposed to be, you should actually run this experiment, i.e., start it over, with a clear understanding of what's going on and what the parameters are. It's unsurprising that people were confused about the parameters since you yourselves were confused about them. Their confusion is on you.

(That being said, for someone not familiar with Maciej's approach to things, I can perhaps understand why you'd think that way.)

Questions:

1. where are these rules published?

2. why would someone (except in this one case involving money for votes) solicit upvotes for a post?