Generally though, consumers have already spoken with their wallets on this topic and they have told many thousands of doe-eyed founders loud and clear: “we will happily sacrifice our time and privacy to save a $3, bring on the ads”

Hence why YC focuses on B2B Saas for B2B Saas companies who sell to other B2B Saas companies.

I don't know, going back years ago, if anything it would have been YC figuring how to push ads/bloatware. It would have just been more subtle about the phrasing and meaning behind what was trying to be accomplished, but the underlying 'value extraction' stories were still there.

The "entrepreneur" aspect of YC generally was about "enshittification" before that word became more used.

However it could be certain headlines attract a certain type of person, allowing for an entirely different subjective experience of what "people on hacker news" are like.

Abusing customers as a business model should not be legal. It's not ethical to begin with, actually, and applauding this practice is interesting.

NO! I've been here long enough to remember PG saying to build something people WANT. YC has become less about technical founders building an MVP and more about the investors finding something they can make money from. The later often depends on "monetization" which has become the driver of enshitification, which is precisely the opposite of what people want and the antithesis of what YC once was.