Does Hacker News Deliver Value For Startups?

Does Hacker News Deliver Value For Startups?
awarelabs.com

Such is the reason HN thrives. Though experience has led me to reason that such behaviour is applied to anyone who sets out to tarnish someone else's reputation. Not only YC people/startups.

>I've even seen high karma members get completely banned because of submissions about Curebit and AirBnB.

Karma is not a good indicator of anything. One can easily gather "karma" by writing useless blog posts that rhyme with the general schools of thought (or thought patterns). I think karma is used here as a tool to promote valuable links that add to the conversation, rather than a tool that measures social hierarchy. Karma does not measure a poster, but the post itself. If you post anything that violates the rules (which are sensible and permissive), then you have proved, without a doubt, that you original intentions were not inline with the "belief" behind HN (information that are interesting to hackers (though inflamatory posts are not interesting)).

>When you come to one persons house, you can't argue if some ground rules are set.

We are also born with gravity wrecking havoc around the universe. What good does bad-mouthing gravity do? =)

I meant that just to underscore the point that (from my observations) PG doesn't care if you have been a long standing community member at HN. I perhaps should of said account age in the many years.

And I agree with this perspective. People who from the first line in their article set out with the intention of just sensationalizing some innocuous or accidental lapse in judgment by a startup clearly are just doing it:

>) For their own gain

>) Aren't trying to create objective discussion

>) Just want to disrupt the startups positive vibe by publishing damaging news about them.

Some things are clearly in the public interest... and should be written about, but some times I've read stories whcih are just beating a horse while it's down, and has been totally unneccessary. I totally disagreed with the way DHH handled the Curebit episode. Curebit were clearly wrong (by direct linking to assets), but the obsenities that he was throwing around so willfully on Twitter just made him appear like a kid who had had his candy stolen.

Reading this site exposed me to a lot of writing about entrepreneurship that was new to me. As the site has grown there has been more and more self-promotional linkbait spam, but some is pure gold and the best bits are often buried in the discussions rather than the articles. The last few years have been a financial and emotional struggle, but it's been tremendously helpful to see other people go through the same ups and downs and often be so open about what works and doesn't work for them. So I'm grateful to Paul and many of the other regular commenters here. Answering this question is a no brainer.