zlacker

>>pg+(OP)
The way to save HN from its own success is to take it to the next level. You need to spin it up into a commercial enterprise. Improving the quality of HN, as it stands today, requires expenditure of human effort, either in the form of professional moderation, or some sort of AI-ish enhancement: pruning of message threads, credentialing users in more sophisticated ways, finding ways to bubble up story submissions that otherwise get lost.

No doubt some will find the commercial option distasteful, but I think the pure crowd-sourced option has run its course. Commercializing HN would allow further expansion, for instance splitting it into several areas of interest. Stackoverflow/StackExchange is a model for this. There is much value that can be added on to HN, as many Hackers have shown in the past with various projects.

>>jackfo+bf
Except that HN already has a commercial purpose: It serves the needs of Y Combinator in some ways. You cannot fill out an application without including your HN handle, everyone on the app has to have one (or get one if they didn't have one already), and Paul reads a lot of the comments here and often is familiar with the person to some degree via their online participation here and that influences decisions concerning who gets into Y Combinator. So whatever gets done here probably needs to be done with an eye towards not undermining that agenda. Making it a commercial enterprise could so radically change the game as to make it useless or even counterproductive for its existing business-related agenda. How much would HN have to be worth to make it acceptable to lose that? I think only PG and the rest of Y Combinator can answer such a question, and possibly only to themselves rather than publicly.

>>Mz+Af
There are all sorts of ways HN could be monitized (which is what I meant by commercialized) without at all impacting its usefulness for evaluating Y Combinator applicants. I just think it will take real investment to upgrade HN, and if it's not monetized it's hard to justify that investment.