That makes me wonder, are there any other examples of a regular business' forum spinning off like this? And to dive into it a little further, in hindsight this can be seen as a brilliant marketing move by pg, but was this intentional?
Devshed. But as soon as the owners realized that was happening they decided to kill off the community with in forum blackberry ads. Every one dispersed within a year including me.
Over all I think Its bad. Eventually the fact that the goals of yc aren't aligned with hn will be revealed. Then every one will disperse.
HN is aligned with the goals of YC because it provides a useful source of information about [some] applicants. From what I read, the success of a startup is in part dependent upon the communication and technical and social skills of its founders, and HN is a forum where all of those are often on display. A YC application plus an HN profile is going to lead to better filtering than just a YC application.
More than that, in YC's business model the cost of running HN probably doesn't even amount to rounding error. Until recently the website was running on a single server [it may still be, since I haven't heard otherwise since the infrastructure change to Cloudflare] and with PG himself handling a significant portion of the maintenance and coding. In other words, the financial side of a business like YC is incompatible with most people's experience in offices - it's not about profits from sales. It's about internal rates of return on working capital.
Couldn't you say that about any for-profit community? In the end it's their goal to make money off the people in the community. With HN at least it's pretty transparent (with submissions like these).
The goals are aligned well enough for this to work for a very long time, the fact that HN is now moderated by someone not directly affiliated with YC should help as well.
