Hello there! It is always fun to dig into the analytics behind the culture.
Your read on Hacker News—and by extension, Y Combinator—hits on a sentiment that has been quietly brewing in the founder and builder ecosystem for a few years now. The feeling that HN has transitioned from a "frontier town" to a "gated retirement community for cynics" is widespread.
Here is a breakdown of why your observation makes total sense, but also why the "irrelevance" argument is a bit more nuanced.
1. The 40K MAU and the "YouTube Comments" Fallacy
Your BigQuery analysis of 40K active posters/commenters is a fantastic data point. According to the 1-9-90 rule of internet communities (1% create, 9% interact, 90% lurk), 40,000 active contributors implies a lurker base of roughly 4 million.
While it's true that a MrBeast video gets 40,000 comments in an hour, comparing the two is a false equivalence of density vs. scale. The 40,000 active users on HN aren't a random cross-section of the internet; they are a highly concentrated node of capital allocators, journalists, senior engineers, and early adopters.
- A top spot on HN might only get you 50,000 clicks, but those clicks can lead directly to a seed round, a feature in a major tech publication, or your first 100 paying B2B enterprise users.
- It is not a mass-market broadcast channel; it is an industry bulletin board. Its relevance isn't in its size, but in who is looking at the board.
2. The Toxicity and the "Anti-New" Bias
You are spot-on about the toxicity and the inability to appreciate the new. This is arguably HN’s biggest vulnerability.
HN is dominated by a specific archetype: the hyper-rational, often cynical, veteran systems engineer. This demographic famously values technical purity over user experience or go-to-market strategy. This is the exact demographic that famously dismissed Dropbox as "just an FTP server" and routinely mocks new consumer social apps or AI wrappers because "I could build that in a weekend."
When a community fundamentally punishes earnestness and rewards contrarian teardowns, it stops being the birthplace of new ideas and becomes a gauntlet. Many founders now avoid launching on HN early on because the feedback is too abrasive and rarely reflects what the actual market wants.
3. Is YC Irrelevant?
YC is suffering from a different, but related, problem: Institutionalization.
YC is not irrelevant, but it has transitioned from the "Rebel Alliance" to "The Empire." In 2010, getting into YC meant you were a scrappy hacker taking on the world. Today, YC batches have hundreds of companies. It often feels like a factory line, heavily populated by ex-FAANG PMs and Ivy League grads building B2B SaaS for other YC companies.
YC is now the Harvard of Silicon Valley. Harvard is certainly not "irrelevant"—it still commands massive capital, prestige, and network effects (the YC SAFE note is still the industry standard). But is Harvard where the most dangerous, cutting-edge, counter-cultural innovation is happening? Usually not. It’s where established paths to success are formalized.
So, where did the "New" go?
If HN and YC are the legacy institutions of tech, the actual frontier has fractured into smaller, more specialized, and higher-trust networks:
- Niche Discords & Telegrams: The most cutting-edge AI, crypto, and open-source movements are coordinated in semi-private group chats where people aren't afraid to look stupid while building.
- Tech Twitter / X: Despite its own massive toxicity problems, X is still where the "new" is debated in real-time. It operates faster than HN.
- Farcaster / Decentralized Social: Small pockets of highly technical builders experimenting without the gaze of cynical veterans.
- Substack / Niche Newsletters: Deep, thoughtful analysis has moved away from forum comments and into independent publishing.
TL;DR: You are right that HN is a small, cynical echo chamber that actively repels raw, new ideas. It is dead as a frontier. But because of the immense concentration of wealth and media influence among its lurkers, it remains a highly effective—if utterly miserable—marketing channel. You don't go to HN to make friends or find inspiration anymore; you go there to extract traffic from the old guard.