HN has sponsored posts. You can identify them because HN’s interface won’t let you comment or vote on them. The buttons and links literally are not present.

Yes, and those should in fact be banned. (Although complaining those specifically is like complaining about mercury tilt switches in a pinball machine in a cafe down the street from a factory that dumps thousands of tons per day of assorted toxic waste into the nearby river.)

You can hide them like any other post, so I don’t see that they are as impactful to user experience as most other ads, which require third party browser extensions and/or DNS level blocking. On balance, I think HN does ads “right” and the only way I think they could be improved is with explicit labeling indicating that they are sponsored, unlike user-submitted posts.

Being entirely anti-ad is an acceptable position to hold, and I don’t really disagree, though it feels a bit of a cheap shot to single out HN like this.

> I don't see that they are as impactful to user experience as most other ads

Yep. Hence the comparison to mercury tilt switches.

> it feels a bit of a cheap shot to single out HN like this

Yep.

If someone is entirely anti-ad, they have to be anti-ad-on-HN.

Exactly. Sponsored posts are ads and need to go, but this is not particularly significant on either side. HN in general is no more a ad than donating money to charity for PR reasons is a ad, and it requires a considerable confusion of ideas to think otherwise. (Or a confusion of what "ad" means. FWIW, BGP address advertisments are not ads either.)

They're not identified as such? I thought it was required to identify such ads.

I thought so too, at least in EU? I remember social media influencers getting in hot water for not labeling sponsored content as such.

HN is literally advertising for a VC firm. That’s why it exists and what it is. If you ban ads from the internet, you’re banning HN.

You can be fooled into believing HN is not advertising because you like it, but that doesn’t change what this site truly is.

No one at YC thinks of HN that way. I certainly don't. If we did, we'd run HN very differently.

You're also wrong about why HN exists. pg created it for a bunch of reasons. Some had nothing at all to do with YC (e.g. wanting interesting things to read, once Reddit stopped being that for him; and wanting to make a web app in Arc) and others did. All of those reasons are still alive today, so your interpretation is much too reductionist.

It's true there are job ads for YC startups, and Launch HN threads for YC startups get placed on the front page (this is all in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). I'd like to hear what you think we should do instead. Surely you don't think HN should give nothing back to YC in exchange for funding it?

I’m not saying don’t do it. I think you’re doing great. HN is clearly a hugely successful content marketing project regardless of how the origin story is ret-conned.

You’ve got a passionate community of rich/technically skilled people who claim to hate ads falling over themselves to explain why this site is somehow different.

Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s more the cognitive dissonance of the commenters here who proudly announce, “I never see any ads” and “ads have no effect on me” that I find funny.