There used to be a screen-shot of HN on the Ycombinator front page to promote HN. Now HN is just a minor menu item lost among the bottom menus. Why was HN demoted? HN is being treated like Pluto.
I can guess a few reasons, without any insider knowledge at all.
- HN was previously a talent farm for YC, which is why only YC companies can post jobs as links. YC likely no longer needs HN for this, since most of their (thousands of?) portfolio companies will go bust and they can recycle talent from there. They also have more than one portfolio company attempting to solve talent shortages in other ways.
- People actually admitted to YC use Bookface to network with each other, not HN.
- Amid the decline in tech valuations, YC may be planning to spin off HN into a separate entity. This makes more sense nowadays for the above reasons.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 19.8 ms ] thread[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- HN was previously a talent farm for YC, which is why only YC companies can post jobs as links. YC likely no longer needs HN for this, since most of their (thousands of?) portfolio companies will go bust and they can recycle talent from there. They also have more than one portfolio company attempting to solve talent shortages in other ways.
- People actually admitted to YC use Bookface to network with each other, not HN.
- Amid the decline in tech valuations, YC may be planning to spin off HN into a separate entity. This makes more sense nowadays for the above reasons.