True, but I find it fairly offensive that my own data is being sold back to me. If it was free I'd be more tolerant. They say the model is costly and I believe it, but what exactly are the margins here? I feel like I've been recruited into some lame hustle.
Thank you for the feedback. This product was made to connect to your own database. I thought it was fun to connect it to the HN bigquery public dataset. We are break even on a good month.
I hope you didn't read what I said as a personal attack, it's not, that's just my feedback on how I feel about this particular idea. I will say that it is clever though, even if it's definitely not for me.
I think the "ick" factor for me comes from the feeling that social engagement shouldn't really be queryable. When I participate here, it's an in-the-moment thing. While I realize my opinions are stored forever and searchable, and I generally stand by most of what I say, I think making meta-products around social engagement changes the flavor and the feeling of how we interact. It's like when someone points a camera at you. Sure, it doesn't really change anything, but also, it completely changes things right?
HN is a loss leader for ycombinator. It's literally a venture capital firm, lmao.