Then again, Y Combinator makes no direct money off HN. AWS’ docs, if they are quality directly impacts their profit because more people can use their services more easily.

YC does two things that aren't directly making money but are definitely helping their portfolio companies:

1) Special ad positions with front-page placement (currently #22 is "Willing (YC S15) Is Hiring a UI / UX Designer" https://willing.com/designer , a privileged post that can't be voted or commented on)

2) The moderators can and sometimes do intervene by removing certain comments that are critical of YC companies.

Comments make the forum more interesting to the community, which increases eyeballs and makes the front page spots more valuable. And shaping the discourse helps with damage control when necessary.

..and collect your personal data, non-directly-identifiable data or otherwise, from both of which they may earn some money (if i understand the privacy policy correctly.. am no lawyer, though)

Nothing is free. If you aren't paying, you're the product.

Actually, quite a lot is free. I have a free tier in my saas product. I don't monetize it in any way. I simply use it as a gateway to paying customers. I think there is probably a great deal of this going on.

Personally, I'm surprised that's a controversial statement.

Its not on this forum. Its so common as to be a cliche.

It's eye-roll inducing at this point.

That's probably true but it seems so easy for people to forget.

Profit, influence, power. They can be exchanged for each other.

YC doesn't make money directly from the forum. But neither does AWS from their docs.

If you have a problem with a company making money directly from your content, why doesn't it bother you if they are gaining something else off you like influence? Do you think HN confers zero value to YC?

AWS does makes no direct money off documentations either.

Engineers generally have a natural tendancy to fix things, and documentaitons are worth fixing. And it also helps their future work.

I think there’s a reasonable argument that documentation is an integral part of usable software.

Not only is there a reasonable argument, a major chunk of Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month" is about documentation being the entire spec and that software should not do anything that isn't in its actual documentation. Write the documentation, then hand it off to the developers to implement.

Hacker News is the textbook example of a highly successful content marketing platform for software engineers. Second only to Joel on Software.

Indirect money as in brand/capital is still wealth. You have contributed to that creation of wealth.