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A comment on Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3. Parent comment

Re:Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3 by davidw on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @11:57PM (#11633927)
It was pretty clearly an experiment, and it looked pretty obvious to me that they were reserving the rights to tweak and nudge and basically run it as they saw fit. It's not like it was a cereal box competition or the lottery or something where you just win some money and that's that.
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Re:Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3 by jjwiseman on Thursday May 05, 2016 @12:57AM (#11634082)
It wasn't a tweak or a nudge, it entirely invalidated the stated intention of the experiment, and completely disenfranchised the HN community.

But that's not the worst, dumbest thing about this. The dumbest thing is that YC would have gotten the most benefit out of giving Maciej the money, and they let their fear and discomfort keep them from doing that.

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Re:Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3 by davidw on Thursday May 05, 2016 @01:05AM (#11634103)
> completely disenfranchised the HN community

Their money on the line, their call. I have never felt "out of the loop" because I didn't influence their investment decisions. The value I get from HN is the conversations and things I read about and learn.

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Re:Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3 by jjwiseman on Thursday May 05, 2016 @01:07AM (#11634111)
Of course, they get to do whatever they want. But their reputation suffers when they say they'll do one thing, then do another, especially when it's a bad decision made for bad reasons and communicated poorly.
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Re:Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3 by webbore on Thursday May 05, 2016 @12:01PM (#11637231)
don't call it a tweak or nudge when the experiment's parameters were deliberately altered to avoid the outcome the data was indicating.

"We had an idea for figuring out where we'd spend our money. We didn't like what happened so we spent it based on other criteria."

So the experiment was maybe the voting / HN selection, but they don't get to paint it as the experiment was "let's see who HN selects, then compare their outcome with traditional participants" like we were led to believe...

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