Just a reminder that this site is not going to be an unbiased discussion of this Tweet thread.
Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
261–270 of 332 posts
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#262To be honest, this feels like a PR stunt since we all know if you add "YC is bad" and share it on HN, people will look and react. I haven't heard of Bolt, I'm not familiar with the space at all. I use Stripe because the product just works and I can trust my business with it. Seeing a CEO who publicly complains turns me away from even wanting to try the product. On a related note - I helped review a little over 100+ Y…
I guess there are two camps. The people who see a story like this and go "hell yeah the underdog strikes back!" dispute how true any evidence may be, and the people who see this story and go, "Stop whining."
If this tweet thread gets massive amounts of traffic, which it looks like it has, and a whole slew of people in the first camp discover Bolt and become potential future customers... Mission accomplished.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#263> Getting a #1 ranking is INCREDIBLY difficult and generates millions of views. I might just have lucked out, but my random framework made it to #1 (based on http://hnrankings.info/26722051/ , didn't know about that site until dang linked it now). HN does not generate millions of visitors/views, even including all the random bots that start scraping your site. I base that on log analysis without any CDN or similar, s…
Yeah I had this feeling as well. I've also gotten a #1 ranking on HN, and held the top 5 most of the day. Friends were messaging me about it, and it did result in decent traffic but hardly MILLIONS.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#264His claims about HN are false. Short version: his post was 2+ hours later than Stripe's, not an hour earlier, and fell in rank because users flagged it, not because moderators did anything (which I suppose is what his mafia/mob language was intended to imply). The longer version is going to involve a tedious barrage of links, but I want this to be something that people can check for themselves if they care to. Quotin…
I get the feeling they got their publicity but unfortunately at the expense of your time. Thanks for the detailed work you do in supporting the community and addressing these allegations in such a detailed way.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#265Striped of the hyperbole, the underlying premise is why accelerators exist ? YC is just the best at it and more visible ? Everyone wants the exclusive network that YC founders get access to. The doors that YC stamp can open. The obvious corollary to that is for not YC company it is harder to open those doors and build those connections. This is central to the model for any exclusive network, tech companies (FAANG) ed…
> Striped of the hyperbole, the underlying premise is why accelerators exist ? YC is just the best at it and more visible ? Yes, but it would be nice to dispense with the mythology that what is going on is the best technology is winning. YC might as well be the alumni association at Harvard. The whole culture in SV / YC / HN / FAANG (and I understand the differences between those) is a value capture mechanism. It sim…
I wouldn't call it fiction , it depends on which lens you see it from.
For a team without the education /experience background in a developing economies or more traditional smb/micro saas product they are privileged.
However no matter how much resources/help stripe got taking on PayPal still means underdog.
Taking on trillion dollar companies like Amazon, Apple Google , MS or even Facebook, with enormous platforms and userbases even with couple of billions in the bank still feels like underdog.
Tesla was and still is some extent an underdog in the automotive industry. The amount of money and support they could leverage from "paypal mafia" and other VCs while enormous doesn't make it an equal fight when taking on Volkswagen, toyata or GM.
They are more likely to see from who is bigger than them rather than who is less privileged.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#266Fwiw I think HN should be more forthcoming on how the ranking of yc co’s posts are ranked vs other posts. Are the ranked differently? Do the upvotes of yc members affect ranking more than other user’s upvotes?
They're entirely forthcoming about this: except for job and launch posts, YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC company upvotes are treated no differently than anyone else's. I think it'd be hard to count how often Dan has said this. You can choose, of course, not to believe him about this (I have a hard time thinking of a person in this industry I trust more than Dan), but you can't ask him to be more forthcomi…
My comment was more about what are all the different ways post can be ranked higher/lower. I trust Dan that the two things I mentioned they don’t do, but is there anything else like keywords/hosts that if yc members knew would give them an edge.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been known that HN has applied keyword-based, domain-based, and manual penalties in the past: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... While I doubt there is a "non-YC penalty", and I doubt there is collusion on dang's part, it isn't correct to think of HN ranking as a unmoderated scoring function.
I didn't say HN operates on an "unmoderated scoring function"; it most certainly doesn't, as Dan has (again) repeatedly said. I said that YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC votes don't count differently.
You are arguing the specifics of my comment and not the spirit of it. It’s not clear all the ways posts are modified and it isn’t clear who all knows all the ways posts are identified.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're entirely forthcoming about this: except for job and launch posts, YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC company upvotes are treated no differently than anyone else's. I think it'd be hard to count how often Dan has said this. You can choose, of course, not to believe him about this (I have a hard time thinking of a person in this industry I trust more than Dan), but you can't ask him to be more forthcomi…
My comment was more about what are all the different ways post can be ranked higher/lower. I trust Dan that the two things I mentioned they don’t do, but is there anything else like keywords/hosts that if yc members knew would give them an edge.
There is no reason to believe anything like that is happening. We do well enough on HN that Dan called us out downthread, and certainly there are no secret tricks we're using --- short of "not having our friends vote us up when stuff of ours gets submitted". I think this is pretty much just conspiracy theories.
The discussion here is pretty unproductive. You're free to simply disbelieve Dan; that's a coherent perspective to have, even if I think it's deeply wrongheaded. But I assume we both know enough about the dynamics of message board "debate" to know that there's an unbounded set of un-falsifiable arguments you can throw up to support the idea that Stripe is unfairly gaming HN. Maybe they've found a wrinkle in the way the second-chance pool is handled!
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't say HN operates on an "unmoderated scoring function"; it most certainly doesn't, as Dan has (again) repeatedly said. I said that YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC votes don't count differently.
You are arguing the specifics of my comment and not the spirit of it. It’s not clear all the ways posts are modified and it isn’t clear who all knows all the ways posts are identified.
It's clear enough, if you pay attention. Follow Dan's comments over time; they're an informal moderation log of the site. You'll see what stuff does and doesn't happen to posts.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have brought up the problem of flagging (or downvoting) in a HN post, but it got flagged. :)
Some threads/subthreads seem to have a gravity for flagging and downvoting (and upvoting!) that's wildy off average and hard to pin down to a cause. Did you check other posts around yours to see if they were getting flagged too?
it was the actual post, not a comment to a post though!