How would you make money off HN? Ads? Subscriptions?<p>Would the people in the HN community stick around if HN started showing ads and selling their data? They could easily move to a similar site, such as lobste.rs.<p>Would people pay money to access HN? Much of the value of HN comes from the users who spend time sifting through a lot of junk articles and comments to upvote the tiny fraction of interesting ones. Are you going to ask users who create the site's content to pay for it?<p>If you can't monetize the site without driving its users away, then it's worth $0.