I think, in the spirit of the community, you should provide some argument for why you think that, rather than just state your judgement.
From a fairly outsider perspective, Maciej/idlewords seems to dislike SV & VC culture (for lots of reasonable reasons) and YC by extension, and is trying to joke/troll here as a form of protest or publicity; OK.
On the other side, the YC/HN guys are actually trying to do something innovative, with YC fellows which is more accessible than vanilla YC (can do remotely), and now with a community choice, which is a step in a more innovative/accessible direction again.
Surely this is a step in the right direction? If not, could someone explain why? If they are trying to make good faith steps in the right direction, and someone is trolling them (by which I mean for humor/protest, not bad intentions), isn't it fair enough to exclude that application?
Did Kevin Hale have special phone conversations with the other three founders to ensure that they would be able to work together with YC?
Meanwhile, look at the the post Kevin Hale just wrote. It says, "We ran a poll for the top applications and the voting was so close that we decided to fund one extra startup. Here are the winners." But that's not true at all. The fact that Pinboard took more than 3x the number of votes as the 2nd place vote-getter is mentioned nowhere in Hale's message.
It was pretty clearly an experiment, and it looked pretty obvious to me that they were reserving the rights to tweak and nudge and basically run it as they saw fit. It's not like it was a cereal box competition or the lottery or something where you just win some money and that's that.
It wasn't a tweak or a nudge, it entirely invalidated the stated intention of the experiment, and completely disenfranchised the HN community.
But that's not the worst, dumbest thing about this. The dumbest thing is that YC would have gotten the most benefit out of giving Maciej the money, and they let their fear and discomfort keep them from doing that.
Their money on the line, their call. I have never felt "out of the loop" because I didn't influence their investment decisions. The value I get from HN is the conversations and things I read about and learn.
Of course, they get to do whatever they want. But their reputation suffers when they say they'll do one thing, then do another, especially when it's a bad decision made for bad reasons and communicated poorly.
don't call it a tweak or nudge when the experiment's parameters were deliberately altered to avoid the outcome the data was indicating.
"We had an idea for figuring out where we'd spend our money. We didn't like what happened so we spent it based on other criteria."
So the experiment was maybe the voting / HN selection, but they don't get to paint it as the experiment was "let's see who HN selects, then compare their outcome with traditional participants" like we were led to believe...
Right about what exactly? The deal was not "we'll give $20k to whoever gets the most upvotes." It was about participating in a YC program, which this person doesn't seem to have any interest in, or at least wants to feign complete disinterest. I'm glad a spot was not wasted on him based on his attitude alone.
Could you be a little bit more careful in minting new truths about people's psychology, especially if you don't know those people, to score points in Internet arguments? The Maciej I know was definitely not disinterested in winning that YCF spot.
The Maciej I know was definitely not disinterested in winning that YCF spot.
Did he want the YCF spot, or the $20k? I don't know him, but the fact that his immediate response was "I want my twenty grand" reinforces my belief that Kevin made the right decision here.
Let me save you the time and (having watched and read quite a bit of Maciej's stuff, internalizing his reasoning about many things in our culture) tell you that he was being deliberately facetious here. (Maybe "facetious" is too strong a word: he was merely speaking in jest, "calling YCF out", perhaps being a bit too flippant due to his (justified) frustration, if any). I'm replying to your comment because I see you reproducing your above point all over the place, and it's sad you think that way about this.
(That being said, for someone not familiar with Maciej's approach to things, I can perhaps understand why you'd think that way.)
If he reiterated that jokey response in his "good-faith conversation" with kevin, then kevin made the right call. I'll agree with tptacek though that they should've just said that, instead of talking about voting rings.
Different people. Dan runs HN, and I'm sure he thinks about voting rings all day long. Kevin is from YC, and thinks about founders and fitting into the YC community. I think it's safe to say that they both had very good, but entirely independent, reasons for not wanting to fund pinboard.
> Did he want the YCF spot, or the $20k? I don't know him, but the fact that his immediate response was "I want my twenty grand" reinforces my belief that Kevin made the right decision here.
The "Kevin talked to Maciej and it didn't seem like it would work out" part seems pretty straightforward. The voting brigade thing seems dumb, but Kevin was pretty explicit that part wouldn't have mattered.
But Maciej is right.