It's all about: do you derive an appropriate value for yourself from being the product?
For example, when you use the Google search engine, you are the product (Google's customers are advertisers). I hope you derive sufficient (average) value from each Google search so that you consider this to be worth it.
For a lot of people I think it's increasingly not worth it. Not only do we never click on ads, but results are getting worse, and often a (local) LLM can answer a large percentage of our questions faster and more privately.
Eh, a think tank usually has some kind of minimum requirements, such as education or industry experience. The usefulness of hackernews lies in "farming the opinions of the kind of dork that hangs out on hackernews" -- this is useful data, but "crowd sourced think tank" is trumping it up a bit i think
Eh, a think tank usually has some kind of minimum requirements
When paid for, I agree that is absolutely true.
When nearly free, thanks to team Daniel it's an input that can be weighted against paid options. The free but large crowd may have thought of things that paid think tank members members holding doctorates may not have. Great ideas are missed all the time and most often until it is too late. There may only be a few golden eggs and many bad eggs but there are quicker ways to sort that out nowadays without an Eggdicator and Oompa Loompas though I do miss the songs. One golden egg could pay for the entire cost of the staff running HN for a decade.
> HN is "free" too. :)
Indeed: you deliver valuable information about market trends, market sentiments, technology, ... to SV startups and investors.
Additionally, Hacker News is basically a marketing expense of YC.