Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
His claims about HN are false. Short version: his post was 2+ hours later than Stripe&#x27;s, not an hour earlier, and fell in rank because users flagged it, not because moderators did anything (which I suppose is what his mafia&#x2F;mob language was intended to imply).<p>The longer version is going to involve a tedious barrage of links, but I want this to be something that people can check for themselves if they care to.<p>Quoting from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;theryanking&#x2F;status&#x2F;1485784877060349953" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;theryanking&#x2F;status&#x2F;1485784877060349953</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;theryanking&#x2F;status&#x2F;1485784882173255680" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;theryanking&#x2F;status&#x2F;1485784882173255680</a>:<p>&gt; <i>Both had organically made it up to #1 on Hacker News with 100s of upvotes</i><p>Their first post, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16215092" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16215092</a>, made it to #2 (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;16215092&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;16215092&#x2F;</a>) and got 171 upvotes. The second, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16870692" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16870692</a>, made it to #4 (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;16870692&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;16870692&#x2F;</a>) and got 70 upvotes.<p>&gt; <i>On April 18, 2018, we posted this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16870692" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16870692</a> [...] An ~hour later, this showed up: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16869290" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16869290</a>. Ours disappeared.</i><p>Stripe&#x27;s post (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16869290" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16869290</a>) was submitted at 17:41 UTC, and Bolt&#x27;s post (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16870692" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16870692</a>) was submitted over 2 hours later, at 20:08 UTC. If you want external evidence for that, look at the hnrankings.info pages for the two posts (Stripe: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;16869290&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;16869290&#x2F;</a>, Bolt: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;16870692&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;16870692&#x2F;</a>). You&#x27;ll see that they first pick up Stripe&#x27;s post on the front page at 17:45 and Bolt&#x27;s at 20:30. You&#x27;ll also see that Stripe&#x27;s post made it to #2, not #1 as he claims.<p>Here&#x27;s the HN front page at 19:09 that day: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418190904&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418190904&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycom...</a>. Stripe&#x27;s post is already at #2. Bolt&#x27;s hasn&#x27;t been submitted yet. The first snapshot with Bolt on the front page is at 20:35: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418203508&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418203508&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycom...</a>. By 21:21, Bolt&#x27;s briefly makes it higher than Stripe&#x27;s: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418212112&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418212112&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycom...</a>.<p>&gt; <i>Ours disappeared</i><p>Bolt&#x27;s post fell in rank because it was flagged by users—that is the drop you can see in <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;16870692&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnrankings.info&#x2F;16870692&#x2F;</a> and in this snapshot by 21:21: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418222105&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418222105&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycom...</a>.<p>I don&#x27;t know why users flagged it. (Edit: generally, though, if you want to figure this out, the best place to look is in the comments. The top comment in the Bolt thread is complaining about non-transparent, enterprise-style pricing - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16871886" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16871886</a>, which is a classic HN complaint. The same complaints had appeared in their earlier thread, for example <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16215604" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16215604</a> and
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16215578" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16215578</a>. We actually downweighted both of those complaints. That&#x27;s standard HN moderation when indignant comments are stuck at the top of a thread.)<p>None of the flags came from YC founders or staff. (Edit: I looked into whether it might have been Stripe people doing the flagging here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30070445" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30070445</a>.) HN moderators did not make the post fall in rank, or moderate the post at all. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d ever heard of Bolt before today.<p>The article no longer exists on bolt.com, but if you want to compare it to
the stripe.com article, the articles are here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418201841&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.bolt.com&#x2F;better-fraud-detection-with-bolt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418201841&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.bolt...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418171628&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;radar-2018" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418171628&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.co...</a><p>His insinuations about HN are false too. He&#x27;s clearly insinuating that we use insider powers to favor stripe.com submissions with special treatment on HN. That&#x27;s precisely what we don&#x27;t do.<p>Stripe succeeded on HN because they were favored by the <i>community</i> for many years. They are one of a small number of startups who have reached what you could call &#x27;community darling&#x27; status on HN. It&#x27;s true that this is incredibly hard to do. Another startup that managed it, around the same time, was Cloudflare (not a YC startup). Startups achieve this by doing three things: producing products that the community considers good, producing articles that the community finds interesting, and mastering the art of interacting with the community. You need all three.<p>I wish more startups would achieve this, YC or not. Whenever I run across one that&#x27;s trying to succeed on HN, I try to help them do so (YC or not)—why? because it makes HN better if the community finds things it loves here. Among the startups of today, I can think of only two offhand who are showing signs of maybe reaching darling status—fly.io (YC), and Tailscale (not YC).<p>All 4 of the startups I&#x27;ve mentioned have the advantage that they were|are targeting programmers, which gives them a fast track to rapport with this community—sort of a ladder in the snakes-and-ladders game. However, that&#x27;s not a sufficient condition for getting a satisfying click with the community, and it isn&#x27;t a necessary one either. The real problem is that so much of the content that startups produce to try to interest this community just isn&#x27;t interesting enough (to this community), and often gives off inadvertent signals of being <i>un</i>interesting—things like seeming too enterprisey, or too slick in the marketing department.<p>If the bolt.com people had asked us for help, I would have been just as happy to help them as anybody else. I would have told them that the opening of their article (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418201841&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.bolt.com&#x2F;better-fraud-detection-with-bolt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20180418201841&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.bolt...</a>) was too enterprisey to appeal to HN. The language is drawn from ecommerce retailing, which makes sense given the little bit we&#x27;ve all learned about Bolt today, but is the kind of thing that comes across as boring on HN. The references to Gartner and Experian feel like reading an enterprise whitepaper, which detracts from credibility with the HN audience.<p>This is the sort of thing I&#x27;ve told countless startups over the years. It&#x27;s dismayingly difficult to express this information in a way that people can actually absorb, but I have a set of notes that I&#x27;ve sent to many startups in this position, which I plan to turn into an essay about how to write for HN. if anyone wants a copy, email hn@ycombinator.com and I&#x27;ll be happy to send it to you.<p>I had a bunch of other things I wanted to say here, but mercifully, I&#x27;ve forgotten them.