Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

> GMail and Maps for Google, defining it as the conglomerate of the Internet age. Mobile for Facebook, defining it as the service that connects people regardless of where they are.

That's an interesting thought. Is it Google or Amazon or Facebook?

Amazon: AWS + retail + Alexa + Kindle + Prime.

Everything about Amazon (going even further back than Google), for the most part, has been Internet based. They're clearly an Internet conglomerate. AWS is a drastically bigger deal for the Internet than Gmail, YouTube or GMaps; AWS is a present or future $600-$800 billion company by itself. Alexa owns the smart speaker market. Amazon is close to being an online retail monopoly. Prime is the world's largest loyalty lock-in program, which none of the other tech giants have (they have various leveraged network moats instead).

Facebook: FB core, FB messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram.

I think FB's combination is at least as potent today as GSearch + YouTube + Gmail + GMaps. How quickly FB's sales have grown rather speaks to that as well. I think GSearch has a plausibly more enduring position than Instagram though. And if you remove Instagram then FB's upside drops off dramatically, it's a shaky position that can be threatened. WhatsApp isn't worth much commercially (relatively speaking) and probably never will be, that acquisition was a competition removing action by FB. As Instagram ages, it'll face an endless line of cooler TikToks vying to rip its userbase away (young people not wanting to be where the old people are or where the last thing was), that process will never stop because social networks are almost always built on trend / fashion / cool and as they age they shed the cool factor. What threats have GSearch and YouTube faced? Not much, it's far harder to compete with them than it is to build the next small social homerun and scale it if it hits. Today, and for this decade, FB is probably as great of a conglomerate as Google, however I would rather own Google's properties than Instagram and WhatsApp (if FB had shown an ability to rapidly spin up new products to catch each cool wave, that would be different; but the exact opposite has happened, FB is risking turning Instagram into Frankenstein's monster, contorting it to keep up with each upcomer like Snapchat and then TikTok).

This is a poor model of Hacker News comment phenomena. It requires all this extra complexity in the theory (comment “waves” and “triggered” reactions, highly generic stereotypes of whether a responder is reflective and thoughtful, and whether this correlates with moderate opinions).

From an Occam’s Razor point of view, this is a very poor theory, and I’d even go further and suggest it indicates unfair bias on the moderators’ part to implicitly subscribe to this judgment about early / quick responders.

A competing, much simpler theory is that Hacker News, like everything else on the planet, is tribal and political. People add comments to support their tribe, and people use upvotes to support their tribe, while they use FAQ & guideline legalese, downvotes, shadow bans and timeout periods to punish opposing viewpoints and tribes they don’t like.

I think the reason people look past this much simpler theory that comports much better with the evidence is that they want to protect a false sense that Hacker News is democratic and tolerant of unusual views, but it so deeply isn’t.

Dang describes dialectics.

> I still don't understand why it's such a successful business

From what perspective? The logic seems relatively straightforwards to me.

- The GitHub interface is usually easier to use than the git interface. This is mostly true for technical users (programmers) and very true for non-technical users (many project managers).

- Setting up a repo on GitHub is easier/faster than setting up your own server+git+backups+etc.

- GitHub adds useful features on top of what git can already do

-GitHub has excellent mind share by virtue of being the defacto home of open source software. It’s the first thing I think of for free and premium source hosting.

- The pricing of GitHub professional packages is small, a rounding error on the salary of your programmers and PMs.

Yes, you could view it as a trap VC lays for bright young minds since success is likely for the VC with a hundred investments and unlikely for the individual. But then, not everyone is wired to work for others. And sometimes you personally need to scratch that entrepreneur itch before you can fathom joining staff meetings. Glad we live in a world where cperciva could decide their own path.