Originally yes, but now this is a complaint forum for pessimistic big tech worker bees to vent their frustrations while never actually having to invest time, money or effort on actually doing anything.
Generally though, consumers have already spoken with their wallets on this topic and they have told many thousands of doe-eyed founders loud and clear: “we will happily sacrifice our time and privacy to save a $3, bring on the ads”
Hence why YC focuses on B2B Saas for B2B Saas companies who sell to other B2B Saas companies.
Originally yes, but now this is a complaint forum for pessimistic big tech worker bees to vent their frustrations while never actually having to invest time, money or effort on actually doing anything.
I don't know, going back years ago, if anything it would have been YC figuring how to push ads/bloatware. It would have just been more subtle about the phrasing and meaning behind what was trying to be accomplished, but the underlying 'value extraction' stories were still there.
The "entrepreneur" aspect of YC generally was about "enshittification" before that word became more used.
It's fundamentally still a forum for VCs to VC. You see this periodically where some topic comes up that's completely antithetical to VC, and gets quickly flagged or downvoted to oblivion, even though there may be lively discussion. For example, this occurs when open source licenses are being discussed. The remaining undead comments are the ones favouring licenses that favour venture capital interests.
I find this fascinating as my impression is usually the exact opposite (all I see is lots of open source fetishism and anti-VC, anti-big tech, anti-AI, anti-risk, anti-new stuff, anti-everything sentiment).
However it could be certain headlines attract a certain type of person, allowing for an entirely different subjective experience of what "people on hacker news" are like.
Please note there are two main branches of open source: there is permissive, which is a donation to venture capitalists, and there is copyleft, which is prohibited from use by venture capitalists unless they play nice. This forum champions the former and is generally opposed to the latter, and the more copyleft it is, the more this forum is against it (LGPL vs GPL vs AGPL vs SSPL).
Generally though, consumers have already spoken with their wallets on this topic and they have told many thousands of doe-eyed founders loud and clear: “we will happily sacrifice our time and privacy to save a $3, bring on the ads”
Hence why YC focuses on B2B Saas for B2B Saas companies who sell to other B2B Saas companies.