> His goal in publishing this information seems to be to foster a community of transparency. To that end, his actions appear entirely consistent.
I think his goal was to help people. The goal of many people in HN comments is to ‘be right’. It’s a cultural thing. What we prioritize, how the community started etc.
I think HN has ‘trying to be helpful’ forces in the long run. There are ideas, content, links to new information that are helpful. But it’s not the priority compared to what many people think is decent. If you look at other online communities that’ll be pretty self-evident.
But again I think the key to HN is it has no direct interest in being helpful. Only as secondary effects. There’s nothing wrong with that - just as there’s nothing wrong with an incubator with a certain philosophy or writing essays that you think are insightful. In the long run, they help. But they don’t prioritize human decency or kindness and there are a lot of false negatives (startups missed in YC, entitlement and biases in some essays, dismissal of what isn’t clearly the right comment, etc).
It’s a cruder world that way. Take for example the culture of ‘X, Y, and Z read drafts of this’ that everyone has emulated. I used to admire that. Team building and acknowledgments! But it’s also encourages a culture of not being open and trying out new ideas. Living in fear of new ideas that will be rejected etc.
And that is something Josh had the balls to reject. There’s no hiding behind his Harvard / MIT connections. There’s just honesty and transparency. HN and YC people could learn a lot from that bravery.
