you raise a valid point about survivorship bias I guess, but as of the last few years it seems a lot of rage bait and do anything to get signal instead of the positive optimism that I felt a lot of the companies offered those years ago. i guess what i'm trying to say is that it has become the final version of itself as a venture firm, whereas before it was quirky (again, I am outsider!! so this is my POV) and backed companies that made products/services that I think made my life objectively better.
end of the day, I really like YC and think they do a good thing overall. but I think people/founders have realized how to game it, if that makes sense.
(* Edit: and they seem to be highly motivated to post comments!)
Of course, right now, gloom is all over most of social media, and everywhere else, for understandable reasons of world reality (besides engagement manipulation/dynamics reasons).
And, within our field, a lot of the current enthusiasm and curiosity for tech news is for getting our economic tickets, in a tech gold rush that is not nearly as optimistic as the Web one was.
Will the optimism on HN come from topics that are interesting, but detached from all that threatens us, like a break or a reminder that there is still goodness and greatness?
Will it come from finding ways to correct or fight against what threatens humanity?
Will it come from tantalizing hints of personal advantage or opportunity to wind up on top?
What you wrote above is so different than what I thought I was reading above that I had to ask myself why it felt that way in the first place. Probably the "nepo founders" bit was what got me, and "fraud-aligned" didn't help either. Maybe also this is a case of the 'rebound' phenomenon where the reply comment says more clearly what was originally meant; that happens a lot too: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
