Tell HN: Apply HN apology and revision
Maciej, I'm sorry. Your interpretation of what I originally posted was not only reasonable, it was how most people read it. The fault was not yours, but mine. We changed the rules of a game you had won, to cover for my failure to anticipate an unwanted outcome, and you were right to be pissed.
We've offered Maciej the $20k, and he graciously accepted and asked us to donate it to the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness (http://www.cohsf.org/). We'll take care of doing so. (Edit 2016-05-08: We now have.)
A note to HN users: The intention behind Apply HN was to do something new to excite and interest the community and engage it with YC in an interesting way. That did happen, but it pains me that it also partly turned into the opposite. If any of you have suggestions for how to do better, I'd like to hear them.
220 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadFuck-ups happen. The biggest difference is how you deal with it.
Seemed to be:
Something won a vote People running the vote decided they didn't like the outcome so they ignored the vote.
It's basically Boaty McBoatface again with similar lessons of "don't run online polls".
I was tempted to draw that conclusion too, but decided it's important to resist. Finding new ways to productively engage this community is a big deal to us. We obviously have a lot to learn, so screw-ups are inevitable, but we're ok with that as long as we can make them right.
Fooy McFooface is the inevitable outcome of online polls which are open to the entire internet, allow arbitrary submissions, and can have traffic easily driven to them. Other forms of online polling -- high-turnout votes with a preset voters list, polls which are hidden away in unlinkable parts of member-only sites, or polls with a moderated list of options, for example -- don't have those problems.
If YC does an "Apply HN" thing again, no doubt the interview step will be in the announcement, but it wasn't this time.
The rest is just miscommunication and bad optics.
'What' did Pinboard supposedly win? I can't find any poll or submission that appears to be contentious. I searched HN https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22apply%20hn%22&sort=byPopula... and found this joke submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441480
I mean, I think I've pieced together what's happened, but I'm still fairly confused and feel like I'm missing a lot of context.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633278
And the "joke submission" wasn't joke at all
I think this interpretation gives YC too much credit -- it was clearly stated that all discussion would happen in public on HN, then they added a private interview without announcing that change, and the reason given for Maciej not passing the interview was that he made Kevin "uncomfortable" (which as many people noted in the thread, is basically Unconscious Bias 101). The optics of the affair were that the contest had been redesigned to exclude Maciej specifically.
I hope that for the next Apply HN there's no final vaperoom stage -- putting something to a vote them sending it off for final decision by the elite is not going to go well a second time. A better process might be an "Ask HN" for each finalist where the YC gatekeepers (along with HN members) could interview the applicant(s) in a public way.
Cryptic might be the wrong word, but having not been here for what happened as it happened, I'd say that trying to piece together what this OP post was about if this was your first exposure to the whole "Pick startups for YC to fund" idea is not at all trivial.
I skimmed enough of the two links dang posted above to know that it would take me more time than I was willing to devote to figure out exactly what went down. The way HN threads are presented makes sense when the threads are alive and active, but are terrible from a historical perspective of how things unfolded if you weren't there to see it live.
This post wasn't cryptic, but could have used a retrospective or summary of facts.
Beyond that, I don't know. I hadn't followed all the action closely enough.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633517
BUT, he "won" ApplyHN with more than double the votes of the next runner up:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22apply%20hn%22&sort=byPopula...
However, he was not selected and there was this post to the winner's announcement yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633278 making it appear there was some bias involved.
FWIW, Pinboard is awesome.
Pinboard won overwhelmingly but was disqualified based on a private, ambiguous, and somewhat troubling conversation that took place outside of HNews threads (where Pinboard's founder made the YCombinator partner interviewing him "unconfortable" for unspecified reasons).
When people expressed reservations about this, the story was revised: The YCombinator partner actually believed that Pinboard's application was just a joke, and in any case Pinboard had violated a secret/unwritten rule not to solicit votes outside of HNews, which disqualified them anyhow.
As todays announcement probably made clear, that didn't really solve the problem, because it felt way too much like "We don't like Pinboard's founder, and we'll revise the rules until he loses." Not saying in any way that's what happened, but that's the optics.
Anyhow, I'm glad things are resolved, it seems everyone walked away reasonable happy, and YCombinator seems to have moved quickly and decisively to draw a line under it and move on. However...
...in my personal view the problem arose 100% because of a series of poor decisions by YCombinator. :(
Edit: The conditions of winning were described as "At the end of the month, we'll rank the startups and YC will fund two. The ranking will depend both on upvotes and on the quality of discussion, similar to how the ranking of stories works. We can talk about this in the comments, but to answer one question I know will come up: Upvotes are an important factor but they're too brittle to rely on exclusively; doing so would encourage the wrong kind of trying to game the system. So we're going to gauge community interest both by upvotes and comments, and in case of doubt I'll make the final call—or better, figure out a way to put the final call to the community." The problem is that 1) the contest was expressed as "find us someone to fund", not "find us someone to interview", and 2) Pinboard wasn't disqualified based on either upvotes or comments, but based on other factors not mentioned in the post.
This is understated. dang is on the record ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11636651 ) that that's exactly what happened.
Man, I keep running across comments from YCombinator that just make this sound worse and worse.
"He made me uncomfortable" "It wasn't a serious application" "He'd be a bad fit" "He vote brigaded"
Which just makes it look like you're throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. My advice, put down the shovel and stop digging the hole deeper.
"the simple answer is he won the votes, he won the poll, but he made me feel uncomfortable in the end. I went into my good-faith phone call with him very much wanting this to work out and I was disappointed to come out of it tense and with less energy than when I went in. It’s touchy feely, I know, but the truth."
"We revised the rules when it became clear that Kevin wouldn't include Pinboard in the YCF program"
It's seriously hard to even keep track of the different conflicting stories. :)
dang, I think the criticism you're getting is unfair considering the openness with which you conduct yourself. You could have easily avoided trouble by being secretive, but you didn't. I hope you don't let a contigent of vocally pedantic people discourage you from continuing your experimentation, which benefits us all when done so openly.
Yes, there was a problem with vote solicitation, and we know how strongly many users feel about this. But the community support for Pinboard was unmistakeable, so there's a tradeoff here either way. In this case, the margin of that community support was so high that I think it has to win.
There are very few community management problems Wikipedia hasn't had to tackle, and, unsurprisingly, this is one of the earliest ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
I've also been e-mailed by strangers asking me to vote for their Show HNs on the /new page, and in one case was even approached "As an influencer [hah!], would you mind spreading buzz around our XYZ Startup that we'll be posting to Hacker News shortly." Usually I just respond to these with "You know there's a voting ring detector, right?", but it's not really clear what is or isn't acceptable from a HN community moderator's perspective.
HN doesn't have a lot of resources to combat abuse (notice how much abuse prevention is just 'dang --- who runs all of HN --- personally writing corrective notices [they're not even the same notices! Dan, get a shortcut completer!]).
I think a pretty big part of their strategy is to wait for serial abusers to do something stupid and then penalize their accounts. It's an arms race. If they list all the things you can do to get a submission penalized, they're making it harder to catch serious abusers.
I do use a shortcut completer—personally recommended by tptacek as it turns out—for some things, but more on the email side.
There's a design point here too. After two years, these comments have shown themselves to be partly formulaic and the sort of thing that could benefit from software support. I'd like that software support to be something available to users, not just moderators. If there were a way for users to convey to each other that a comment could be edited to better follow the guidelines, that'd be great, because we (actually just I in this respect, since I'm the only one currently posting moderation comments) would no longer be the bottleneck. The long-term vision for HN is to make it a self-regulating system.
original poster meant that writing these posts are cathartic for you because they let you "untangle the knots" in this situation. he is referring to your (commonly believed) good-hearted nature and how it must be relieving for you to set things right.
he didn't mean that you are using these posts to let off some steam, as you have perceived it.
1. Make this "HN selects startups which get invited for YC interviews", i.e., a feeder into the existing system. Essentially, use HN to supplement the network of YC alumni who help out with the application-filtering.
2. Since YC will explicitly still have the final say, open this to both Fellowships and YC Core applications.
3. Have a standardized form. Or possibly even a "make this application public" checkbox on the regular YC application form.
4. Use a more sophisticated voting system. I think a "which of these two looks better" combined with a form of Elo rating could work quite well.
EDIT: To the people voting this comment up: Do you agree with all four of those suggestions, just some of them, or are you voting it up because you like the fact that I'm offering ideas despite thinking that these four are all bad ones? As Dan has said a few times recently, discussion is more useful than votes. :-)
How about only HN accounts with a verified email address can vote, and then you vote via a "Sign up for their mailing list" button? That way you're forcing voters to have some skin in the game, and also leaving the startups who participate with a tangible asset.
I just only comment when I feel like I can add something to the conversation, and always pause before commenting (stops me from getting into flame wars)
So age of account should have some say, or at least if they can see how often you read and vote for stories and comments here.
I think that's a bad idea given how different the startups are. It doesn't make sense to me to compare for example AirBnB (what it was when they applied) with Tarsnap or AutoMicroFarm with Cruise.
I'd actually like to see the winners bypass an interview stage. As discussed on the previous results thread I think this is an opportunity for YC to shed any biases in their interviewing process and see what the results are.
Are there biases in the YC community that will come into play? Surely. Are they different biases than the YC interview process? That's why we experiment.
If you're going to have a interview step, then by all means list it. But I think it's an open question whether the interview step is a good idea, at least in the context of relatively rare contests for a Fellowship spot.
I also don't think a more elaborate voting system is needed, but requiring voters to have a certain karma and/or account age threshold seems like a good idea.
Which probably isn't the best phrasing, but I'm serious about the question, for people on HN the motivation to participate is that it is fun or interesting or whatever, so I wonder how many rounds of votes you can squeeze out of that.
In the world of PR, there's a very strong bias towards appeasement. If a controversy gets big enough companies tend to just 'give in.' But these victories are hollow ones as the true rightness or wrongness of the controversial actions become irrelevant. It's impossible to know whether a corporate/organizational apology is genuine or if the stakeholders are simply appeasing the crowd.
My gut says this phenomenon has become more powerful in the social media era as consumer voices are more easily amplified.
1) $20K
2) Participation in YCF
Maciej was rejected because Kevin didn't want him to participate in YCF; Maciej' objection was always "I want my 20K", implying that though YC conflated those things to be the same, he saw them as separate.
You'll note that this apology says "We've offered Maciej the $20k", and says nothing about YCF, so if it's appeasement, it's only partial. It seems most everyone is satisfied that dang apologized and Maciej said "donate the money". Frankly, I would've liked to see Maciej go through YC, because I think it might've had better long-term consequences for the ecosystem in general.
Where did he say that? I missed it somehow. In the Twitter feed and HN comments, he kept saying he'd invest the money in his business in various ways. The Apply HN said something similar although in a trolling way. Never mentioned he intended to throw it away while others were going to build (or improve) a business with it.
Edit: I assume dang isn't lying; if he had been, @Pinboard would've already skewered this post.
Promise one thing for cash and do another involved is the basic definition of fraud. Only difference is they went along with it to right a wrong. Had he not entered, money would've possibly gone to a startup doing exactly what they promised they'd do.
Fraud or not, giving him the money was a waste vs somebody that would do what they said. I'd have apologized then been honest about why I'd not pay him. Something along lines of "He's probably trolling us and will just give it to charity or something. Doesn't really need it for his business." If I had the foresight.
Note that I'm critiquing Maciej here, not YC.
What a bizarre interpretation of events you've made.
That's what happened rather than a bizarre interpretation. My interpretation was he went back on his own word. Which he did given I couldnt find charity or donation in whole, other thread.
He said both: that he wasn't doing it for the money, that he wanted the money, and things he could spend it on for Pinboard. If he didn't want the money, then it's a decent outcome. His comments and Twitter feed implied to me otherwise.
Afterward, he said (a) that he wanted to get what he deserved as a the winner, phrased as "give me my 20k", and (b) that he didn't actually need $20,000 as an investment with no other context.
Both of these positions seem eminently reasonable.
This is a pretty dishonest characterization, isn't it? Maciej was rejected because he didn't want to participate in YCF, according to what kevin and dang have previously explained about their post-vote phone call. Of course, that was their version of the call. I may have missed where Maciej countered with, "Not true. I wanted to participate in YCF. Kevin didn't want me in the group."
Disclaimer: I voted for Pinboard.
Kevin explained pretty clearly that it was his call, and Maciej disagreed with that.
Edit: I'm probably being overly pedantic here. I rally behind Maciej's contention that we are all adults and don't have to feel warm and fuzzy about each other to work together. I suppose that's his way of saying he was okay with participating in YCF. I seem to be in the group who read the Apply HN experiment as applying via the community, and entailing YCF participation. I keep getting the sense from Maciej and others that their reading was this was a contest to win $20K, with no expectation to participate in YCF. I'm probably in error here.
"If the votes swing my way, I'd be happy to have a good-faith conversation with you."[0]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441978
So, good-faith conversation occurred. Didn't go well obviously. Definitely seems to indicate that 30 days ago, there was an understanding that participating in YCF and winning the $20K wasn't simply a matter of votes swinging one way.
It's possible to be right about a lot of things while still being wrong about something important, and it's also possible to apologize for that without giving up the whole decision entirely.
If anyone wants to join me in also donating to the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, here is the donation form linked on their site:
https://www.networkforgood.org/donation/MakeDonation.aspx?OR...
(You have to actually click the "Take Action" link in the header: http://www.cohsf.org/)
Owning the problem was in question, and HN owned it.
They were ridiculously shitty. Somebody called them on their shit and they decided to be okay normal people.
Fuck the notion that being a non awful person after being awful is praiseworthy. It's better than remaining awful but it deserves zero props.
Dang was a dickhead because he wanted a different outcome and he is still so dishonest that he pretends it's just a misunderstanding.
fuck dang. He's a garbage human.
Not only is this completely inappropriate and unwarranted, but it's doubly so because you're taking advantage of dang and kevin acting professionally to misrepresent the situation.
acting professional strikes at the core of what went wrong here, at why so many are antagonized by the tech culture despite the enormous value it has already generated, and partly at why the yuga that is ending has been the worst of the four in cycle.
be human, don't act professional. how? self actualize.
edit: down vote made me realize my first line was a personal attack. changed "you" to "many"
The right thing to do seemed pretty obvious, and it would have been easier to just give it to Pinboard in the first place. The skeptical view here is that they're only fixing things because they were so vocally called out for screwing up.
So yeah, taking responsibility is great, but doing the wrong thing and taking responsibility only you're called out for it, isn't so great. When possible, just do the right thing in the first place.
Otherwise, we just live in a world where everybody demonizes each other and we are knives out all the time. Oh, wait...
You can't ask for much more than a full apology and an offer to make it right. This was as good as we can expect to get.
I'm not saying YC should go out of business, or YC funded companies should be boycotted or anything like that, but some negative publicity is well deserved. The parent comment seemed to be sweeping the whole thing under the rug.
Being allowed to go "oops, our bad" every time would have bad consequences, I agree. Being able to go "oops, our bad" every now and again because you usually do ok is another matter entirely.
One of the incentives to do good can very well be that it makes you more likely to get off easy when something occasionally goes wrong - it's good insurance.
It boils down to trust: You get off easy with a "oops, our bad" when people believe it is a genuine, occasional mistake, rather than a regular case of "shit, they caught us, better backpedal".
I wish I could say the same for YC. Kevin's post about why Maciej wasn't accepted was a textbook example of the sort of thinking that leads to the terrible lack of diversity we have in tech. Nothing about this changes that. 20k is relatively little money for both YC and Maciej, it's nice to see it go to what looks like a worthy cause but it doesn't really address the core issue at all.
The arguments about diversity in tech are normally framed in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation etc. But in this case the issue was in diversity of ideas relating to startups. I think Maciej makes some very compelling arguments that the sort of model that YC promotes is seriously flawed, and was basically rejected because of that. I think his arguments are ones that many young entrepreneurs should hear.
If you replace the first couple of sentences of Kevin's post with "The simple answer is that ${the woman | the black person | the gay person} was clearly the best candidate, but just made me feel uncomfortable in the end. It’s touchy feely, I know, but the truth." they could have been successfully sued, and for good reason. Think of the 20k as settling out of court.
I generally agree with Maciej's assessment of the startup world, and it's sad to have one of my major prejudices about it confirmed so clearly. My estimation of YC has definitely sunk even lower after this.
It's very hard to do this, and it's my firm belief that only those of good character have the strength and fortitude to do so!
Maciej, you're a gracious guy and the manner in which you handled this was also exemplary.
As an aside: dang has one of the toughest and most thankless jobs you can imagine: moderating HN and ensuring that trolls, unstable people and those with hurt feelings are fairly dealt with and at times corrected. I am one of those people who dang has had to quietly speak with after I emailed HN, and his gracious, open and firm communication speaks volumes, and is one of the reasons why HN is the best and most interesting forums on the Internet.
@dang - I know you sometimes have to make tough decisions where all parties involved end up unhappy with the end result. But I'm sure that the vast majority of the community appreciates what you do. At the very least I do.
It's not said very often, so I wanted to rectify that.
Alternately, what Maciej did with the money is more irritating now given point of competition and his comments in it. I was more interested to see what value in business he could create with it given Pinboard success. (rolls eyes)
Nonetheless, strange about all the complaints about YC not doing what they said with basically nothing but my comment saying same about Maciej's use of the twenty grand. Both would seem to be a problem.
He mentioned in a comment that $20K was 3 weeks revenue.
Considering the badness that ensued, Maciej's request for a charitable donation seems entirely correct. Pinboard can earn $20K easily enough, and the potential for good to come of the clash between views is no longer a possibility. It also serves as a useful escape hatch from the controversy; we don't have to revisit it in the future, as the question of how Pinboard spent the money is now moot.
So, I remain annoyed by that waste or going back on his claims even though I see what you're saying in terms of just ending situation in a mutually agreeable way.