https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news Skip to main content The New Yorker * Newsletter To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Sign In Search * News * Books & Culture * Fiction & Poetry * Humor & Cartoons * Magazine * Puzzles & Games * Video * Podcasts * Archive * Goings On * Shop Open Navigation Menu To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories Close Alert The New Yorker Letter from Silicon Valley The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News Can a human touch make Silicon Valley's biggest discussion forum a more thoughtful place? By Anna Wiener August 8, 2019 * * * * * Save this story for later. Glowing celestial hands hover over a pair of hands typing on a keyboard. The question facing Hacker News is whether the site's original tech-intellectual culture can be responsibly scaled up to make space for a more inclusive, wider-ranging vision of technology.Illustration by Scott Gelber * * * * * Save this story for later. Content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. Open-plan offices offer few pleasures; one of them is snooping on other people's browsing habits. When, years ago, I began working for tech companies in San Francisco, I noticed that my co-workers were always scrolling through a beige, text-only Web site that resembled a nineteen-nineties Internet forum. They were reading Hacker News--a link aggregator and message board that is something of a Silicon Valley institution. Technologists in Silicon Valley assume familiarity with Hacker News, just as New Yorkers do with the New York Post and the New York Times. For some, it's the first Web site they pull up in the morning; it captures the mix of technical obsession, business ambition, and aspirational curiosity that's typical of the Valley. On any given day, its top links might include a Medium post about technical hiring; a 1997 article from Outside magazine about freezing to death; an open-source virtual private network hosted on GitHub; an academic paper, from 2006, about compiler construction; an announcement from Facebook's corporate communications team; a personal blog post about Linux kernels, and another about selling Vidalia onions on the Internet. Nearly all the software engineers I know check it religiously. Not one of them has a neutral opinion about it. Like many of the software products that have shaped the Valley, Hacker News began as a side project. In 2007, the venture capitalist Paul Graham, who was then the president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator--an early investor in Dropbox, Stripe, Reddit, Twitch, and other companies--built the site as a way to experiment with Arc, a new programming language that he was co-authoring. Originally, Graham named the site Startup News. He hoped that it would serve as a new home for the startup founders and "would-be founders" who had once gathered on Reddit, before that site grew too popular to feel like a community. Among other benefits, he imagined that Startup News might help him find worthy entrepreneurs. ("There are a number of Reddit users that I know only by their usernames, but I know must be smart from the things they've written," he explained, in his launch announcement. "We're counting on the same phenomenon to help us decide who to fund.") Within a few months, though, Graham found that startup-centric conversation had its limits. He renamed the site Hacker News, and expanded its focus to include "anything that good hackers would find interesting . . . anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." (Hacker News is still owned by Y Combinator.) [anna_wiene] Anna Wiener is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, covering Silicon Valley, startup culture, and technology. She is the author of "Uncanny Valley." More:Silicon ValleyTechInternetSocial MediaStartups The Daily The best of The New Yorker, every day, in your in-box, plus occasional alerts when we publish major stories. E-mail address [ ] Sign up By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Read More A mean looking email with animal trappiong Annals of Technology What the Superhuman Controversy Reveals About the Shifting Ethics of Software The e-mail startup isn't the only company learning that a product can be powerful and elegant without being good. 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