I believe one of the reasons I keep coming back to hackernews is the absence of ads and the near complete focus on content. Shout out to those who work in the background to keep it like this. It would be interesting to hear from dang or other insiders how evident it is that this website is adfree. At some point there must have been someone who probably raised the idea that money could be made by injecting an ad or a tracker here or there. The article uses the example of the print version of the New Yorker, as a way of how things can be. From interviews with David Remnick, the editor, I learned that it has been mostly his vision to decrease the ads in the print and making up the lost revenue by increasing the subscription fees. It’s these people we need to save the media landscape.

YCombinator, the accelerator which invests in startups, is a money printer. Any tiny amount of money generated by ads on Hacker News would be a rounding error.

The site does technically show ads. YCombinator companies can post job ads here. The job ads are privileged in that users are not allowed to comment on them.

Now that I think about it, I haven't seen many job postings from YCombinator companies in a long time. Though to be honest, after some of my experiences with applicants from postings I put in the "Who's hiring" threads I could see why they this site might have fallen out of favor as a hiring location.

Pedantic point: YC has ads, they are just blend in much better and are delivered in the same medium.

Hiring posts (definitively) and tech posts (maybe) by YC companies. The whole product is one big ad for a venture fund. Its generally well done and unobtrusive. So kudos to them for that it goes relatively unnoticed.