Why is Hacker News like that?
Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers”1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it funds, and feeds people with ideas into its incubation program. Hacker News is one of the most popular forums for discussing technology online today – perhaps the biggest.
HN also has a pronounced political bias, which is growing more exaggerated with time. Many of its users have long claimed centrist or “apolitical” views. On a forum created by a startup incubator, it’s no surprise that capitalism is generally taken as given, often with a libertarian angle. Labor is generally de-emphasized (the consensus on HN is almost always anti-union) and openly advocating left economics like communism or socialism is generally frowned upon. Progressives have, on the whole, abandoned the forum.
The right wing has not. Yesterday, I saw a post about the new release of the Grok LLM, Elon Musk’s “anti-woke” AI project. Virtually all of the comments are fawning over the release, and debating the finer points of its technical achievements, price, and competitiveness. There are remarks that object to the tool on the basis that its owner, Elon Musk, is a fascist, and that it is designed to amplify hate speech. Almost all of these remarks are “flagged”, moderated by other HN users until they are not visible by default.2
Some examples of comments flagged out of existence:
Until Musk owns up to his Nazi salute, I won’t be using Grok, sorry. I don’t care how good or cheap it is. And no, I won’t stop talking about it either.
Your friendly reminder that Grok is owned and directly steered by the white supremacist guy with the fascist haircut who does nazi salutes and fucked up decades of international order to settle scores for his apartheid south african family. Any amount of using the model supports this.
I’m dying to know how everyone who works on this product sleeps at night. How does one reconcile a sense of ethics with helping Musk make more money on AI-generated CSAM and racism
And, my personal favorite:
I have to say I’m a little perplexed by HN’s perpetual willingness to use grok like it’s a normal product made by a normal company.
There’s often frustration that every thread related to a Musk company includes a discussion about Musk, but Musk himself caused that by being the only tech founder to actively campaign for Trump. (Zuck, the runner up, didn’t do anything even close to this). Every product at every company he owns is hopelessly tethered to his decision to do that, and deserves to be judged on those terms.
Another popular story today is about US rollback of climate regulation under Trump. Some fraction of every cent you spend on Grok goes to support stuff you hate, and yet people get genuinely annoyed when you point it out. Musk and his companies really are special and should be treated as special.
Every thread about a Musk company or product needs a comment like this one. If we had the right values, every comment would look like this one.
All of these are gone.
Overt hate and bigotry on Hacker News is uncommon, but not rare, and often gets pushback. Covert hate (e.g. dog whistles) is more common, and when called out the call-out usually gets flamed rather than the hate. Unexamined bias against progressivism and the rights and interests of anyone who isn’t the “default” middle-class white cis male, is incredibly common, and anyone who questions these biases is generally subjected to flames and moderation action.
Why is Hacker News like this?
Hacker News has two formal moderators, both employed by Y Combinator: Daniel Gackle, aka dang, and Tom Howard, aka tomhow. Scott Bell (sctb) assisted with moderation until 2019. They employ a variety of technical tools to do the job, including:
Moderators occasionally post comments and intervene in discussions, steering things one way or another or explaining their moderation decisions.
There are also automated moderation systems, which for example try to detect flamewars with heuristics like the ratioes between post score, age, and the number of comments, and apply a downward pressure to the post’s ranking to reduce the visibility of controversial topics. Of course, the topics which are deemed controversial by the automated systems are, more often than not, progressive politics.
Users above a certain (small) amount of “karma” gain the ability to “flag” posts, allowing Hacker News to self-moderate. Posts or comments can be hidden entirely (made “dead”) with a small number of flags, particularly early on, before they gain enough votes to influence the flagging algorithm. This is the mechanism which was used to silence criticism of Grok and Elon Musk in the thread discussed earlier. By and large the flagging mechanism is used to silence progressive opinions and articles from being posted on Hacker News. Once a post or comment is flagged, it can be “vouched” for, but this generally does not work in practice due to a relatively straightforward bias: flagged posts are only visible to users who opt-in, are moved to the bottom of threads and hidden from view, and one can flag at any time but cannot vouch for a post proactively. Once a comment or post is gone, it generally stays gone.
The moderators tend to view the automated moderation and the flagging mechanism as neutral, and use it to deflect responsibility for moderation decisions onto the tools or the users who use them, i.e. the “community” in the abstract.3 However, ultimately the moderators are in control of these tools and are aware of their biases and the outcomes they produce.
So… why is Hacker News like this?
Hacker News is like this because the people responsible for it are like this, in particular the people at and in the orbit of Y Combinator.
Hacker News goes to some lengths to portray itself as independent of the company that owns it, Y Combinator. Nonetheless, Y Combinator decides who gets to be in charge of Hacker News, and the raison d’être of Hacker News is, at least originally, a forum for YC-backed startup founders to socialize and discuss the news of the day. To this day, YC-funded startups have access to special privileges on HN, in particular the ability to post directly to the front page with a special ranking algorithm (to advertise job openings and announce startup launches). There is also a feature that allows YC founders to spot each other more easily, with their usernames showing up in orange to each other.
The YC startup directory lists (almost) all of the companies which have received funding from Y Combinator, a list which shows a history of funding companies without a competent ethical evaluation. Coinbase, for example, is one of YC’s “unicorns”, and has donated tens of millions of US dollars to various pro-cryptocurrency political organizations, which tend to skew right wing by a ratio of 2:1, and Coinbase now funds fascist David Hansson’s Omarchy project. We’ll talk more about Coinbase momentarily. David is also funded by Stripe, another particularly successful YC alumni.
YC also funds companies that specialize in military and police applications, such as Code Four, Lakonia, Closure, Abel Police, Ravn, and more. They were early investors in Flock Safety, a company now notorious for putting up surveillance equipment across America – much of which is now being torn down by infuriated citizens. Another great example is Optifye.ai, surveillance software for monitoring workers in sweatshops in India, and a member of YC’s winter 2025 batch.
Many companies – AirBnB is another example – funded by Y Combinator share the same “move fast and break laws” mindset that is particularly popular among their alumnus. There are many dozens of examples of such companies among Y Combinator’s portfolio, but I won’t belabor the point.
Y Combinator was founded by Paul Graham in March 2005, along with three collaborators, though Paul (aka pg) was and remains the face of the operation. Paul wrote and launched Hacker News himself using his own dialect of Lisp, and to this day he tends to be revered by the HN community and certainly by the community of Y Combinator founders, partners, and investors. To what extent modern-day HN culture flows from his original spring can be debated, but we can at least understand the nature of that spring.
Let’s consult his blog for some insights. I suggest you click through to my examples and read/skim them yourself for more juicy quotes.
In April 2022, Paul posted “On Heresey”, a post of interest to our question. He explains his feelings on calling someone “x-ist” (i.e. sexist, racist, etc), like so:
For example, when someone calls a statement “x-ist,” they’re also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. They do not, having said this, go on to consider whether the statement is true or not. Using such labels is the conversational equivalent of signalling an exception. That’s one of the reasons they’re used: to end a discussion.
There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the right and the left. The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like.
Note that this essay was published a mere three months after the January 6th US capital insurrection, where a right-wing mob stormed the US capitol building, erecting a gallows on the lawn and calling for Mike Pence’s head.
A more recent essay, January 2025, “The Origins of Wokeness”, also provides ample insight into Paul’s character. Paul on racism:
Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don’t think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
I saw political correctness arise. When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it. It was still not a thing when I started grad school in 1986. It was definitely a thing in 1988 though, and by the early 1990s it seemed to pervade campus life.
What happened? How did protest become punishment? Why were the late 1980s the point at which protests against male chauvinism (as it used to be called) morphed into formal complaints to university authorities about sexism? Basically, the 1960s radicals got tenure. They became the Establishment they’d protested against two decades before. Now they were in a position not just to speak out about their ideas, but to enforce them.
And on sexual harassment:
One thing I noticed at the time about the first phase of political correctness was that it was more popular with women than men. As many writers (perhaps most eloquently George Orwell) have observed, women seem more attracted than men to the idea of being moral enforcers. But there was another more specific reason women tended to be the enforcers of political correctness. There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a “hostile environment.” Within universities the classic form of accusation was for a (female) student to say that a professor made her “feel uncomfortable.” But the vagueness of this accusation allowed the radius of forbidden behavior to expand to include talking about heterodox ideas. Those make people uncomfortable too.
Was it sexist to propose that Darwin’s greater male variability hypothesis might explain some variation in human performance? Sexist enough to get Larry Summers pushed out as president of Harvard, apparently.
In addition to, in his position as the president of Harvard University, making bio-essentialist remarks about the inherently lesser intelligence of women to explain the demographics of his student body, Larry Summers was a personal friend and correspondent of Jeffrey Epstein, though this connection was not generally known at the time Paul wrote this essay.
Then there’s Sam Altman, who looms large in the history of Y Combinator. Sam was a member of YC’s first cohort of startups, and later became a partner at YC in 2011. Ultimately, Sam replaced Graham as its president in 2011, serving in this role until (roughly) 2019, leaving more or less in disgrace to focus on OpenAI.4 Until then he was held in high regard by Graham and others at Y Combinator, with Graham famously