Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3
A word about why Pinboard is not included. We spent a long time thinking about this, since the original application did sound trollish, but comments like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11442027" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11442027</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11590386" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11590386</a>, and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11590315" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11590315</a> made us think it was also serious. Had we thought it was merely a joke, of course we&#x27;d have disqualified it. We&#x27;d referred to that as the Boaty McBoatface scenario when planning the experiment and deliberately included a measure of moderator review as a way of filtering such applications out. But we wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. We like Maciej&#x27;s writing as much as the rest of HN does, think Pinboard is a fine company, and Kevin was excited by the prospect of working with it. So we decided to include it in the runoff, knowing that its pre-existing popularity would probably make it a winner. That last part isn&#x27;t necessarily a bad thing; popularity is a good property for a founder and company to have.<p>But then two things happened. First, Kevin and Maciej had the good-faith conversation described at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11441978" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11441978</a>, and Kevin reluctantly concluded that Maciej doesn’t want to participate in the program as intended. I don&#x27;t know the details and can&#x27;t speak for Kevin, but that&#x27;s his call to make as the partner who runs YCF, and I know he hoped and expected it to go the other way. Getting into a YC batch isn&#x27;t a cash prize—it&#x27;s a close working relationship, and that&#x27;s something that has to be right on both sides or it won&#x27;t work. Both Kevin and I wanted it to work (if we hadn&#x27;t, we&#x27;d simply have dropped Pinboard from the runoff and said why), and I felt sure that a good-faith conversation would be enough to bridge any remaining gap. It turned not to be, which is disappointing.<p>Second, we found evidence of vote brigading, something we&#x27;d disqualify others for. I don&#x27;t believe that Maciej organized a voting ring (actually I don&#x27;t believe he&#x27;d give it a second&#x27;s thought), but when we dug into the data we found that the votes for Pinboard look dramatically different from the votes for the other startups. I presume this is the effect of Pinboard&#x27;s (deservedly) large audience being asked to promote the post, e.g. at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Pinboard&#x2F;status&#x2F;727255170594131968" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Pinboard&#x2F;status&#x2F;727255170594131968</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Pinboard&#x2F;status&#x2F;719599297604390912" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Pinboard&#x2F;status&#x2F;719599297604390912</a>. We didn&#x27;t know about those links earlier; we only found out about them from user complaints after the runoff was posted. But we would and did disqualify people for soliciting votes on a small scale, so it wouldn&#x27;t be right to allow soliciting them on a large one.<p>We&#x27;re sad about this. As I said, Kevin and I both really wanted it to work--I thought it would be good for HN and Kevin admires Pinboard. We also appreciate that humor and irony and &quot;a variety of publicity stunts&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11443463" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11443463</a>) are Maciej&#x27;s style, and he was simply practicing it. That part is not a problem--as readers, we enjoy it too, and creative cleverness has always been prized on HN. I both take Maciej at his word that he wasn&#x27;t trolling and Kevin at his word that he tried to find a way to accept Pinboard into YCF and in the end just couldn&#x27;t.<p>We&#x27;re going to have a community discussion about things that didn&#x27;t go so well with this first Apply HN experiment, but I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d put this in that category. I&#x27;m glad that we chose to believe the serious parts of what Maciej posted. I think it was the right call, I still believe them, and under similar circumstances would do the same again. It&#x27;s not always easy to tell the joking bits apart from the serious bits, but that goes with the territory.