PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

Even after all these years I have no idea what Y combinator is or does, nor do I care to learn. I just come here for news stories.

Not that there's anything wrong with just reading the stories, but I'm a bit incredulous that you haven't passively picked up the thesis, from the stories about the investment changes, demo days, and all the uh... YC startups that get discussed and front-paged.

There were some years when there were a slew of "Here's what I learned from applying to YC" stories, but those have mostly faded, and so have most startup-focused stories.

Now HN is a mix of tech news and politics, and I'm not surprised that some HN readers who are not interested in startups have no clue what YC is about.

I would strongly suggest looking through some of Paul Graham's essays [1]. Doesn't matter what Y Combinator is or does but the founder of Y Combinator has some interesting opinions and writes about them a lot and some of them may enrich your life.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

Not that you asked, but, in a nutshell, they invest in and advise early stage startups.

This has been a big concern of mine lately. I spend more time here than I used to, but I increasingly get less and less value out of the time I spend here. I used to come here to learn about bleeding-edge technology and startups and cool ideas and things that geniuses were working on. Now when I come here I almost always end up arguing politics, not because I want to but because those are the stories that people actively comment on and I have poor self control.

The few tech stories that do make it through are far more pop-tech article (right now NPR, BBC, New York Times, MSN, and Haaretz are all on the front page... absolutely nothing to do with hackers or gratifying intellectual curiosity) or talking about startups that are shutting down.

I'm tired of collapsing the inevitable "Macbooks are bad" thread and finding out that was literally the only conversation under the article. I think the mods do a great job of keeping the conversation civil, but a poor job of enforcing "intellectual curiosity" like the guidelines call for.

If I can offer advice, give your piece if you feel it matters and then move on. One of the nice bits of HN is you can say your opinion and move on. There are no reply notifications. I definitely ended up engaging on forums way more than I should have. I quit one and used that to push myself out of commenting. Now I spend some time commenting here but don’t let myself get pulled back in to needless arguments. There’s a bunch of topics you can skip here and I generally guess at the sentiment of the comment before jumping in. There’s a few things that just end up rehashing the same arguments. Skip them and move on.

I think that has to do with a general souring of opinion on the tech and startup space, including by the people in it. And we're in one of those times where politics and current events are so heavily impacting everyone in every way, including tech and startups, that it's impossible to ignore or avoid talking about, especially when some of the people who have fallen out of love with tech are politicians who want to regulate it.

> There are no reply notifications.

That's mostly true. It doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere and is not very well-known, but dang maintains hnreplies.com, an email notification service for HN. Apparently only 1860 users are signed up, but it's there.

In general, I agree with your advice. Very often I get halfway through writing a comment, but delete it because I don't think it will spawn useful conversation or be appreciated, whether it's because I'm being needlessly argumentative, or the person I'm replying to is.

Can I suggest the app "materialistic"? It doesn't show votes and, unlike the website, there's no easy way to see other people's replies to your comments. Also, being on mobile makes me less inclined to write essays. Overall this cuts the engagement feedback loop, and the result is that I mostly only contribute when I feel my comment makes a meaningful contribution.

...until recently, when I discovered that the website has a way to list your comments and their replies. Since then I've been using the website more, and I don't like how it's changed my engagement patterns. More looking at and thinking about karma, more replying to someone just because they replied to me. I guess generally more "social", in the bad (for me), human-level meta communication (ego, drama, etc), instead of with the more interesting content / ideas.