Because Hacker News is not Reddit. AMA exists on Reddit and Reddit is well served for that purpose, so why pollute the Hacker News feed with it?
People are free to post anything they want on Hacker News, it's then up to the community, via upvotes and downvotes to decide if they want to see it. If you don't see AMA on Hacker News it's because people who read Hacker News, in aggregate, don't want to see AMA on Hacker News.
Isn't this what IndieHackers.com does? I don't agree that all AMAs are just for advertisments. There are many AMAs money has nothing to do with. Some AMAs are very educational, especially from those who been around for 20 years or more.
1) AMA format inherently suppresses conversation - the "host" can usually only reply to a relatively small number of top level questions, so many questions and the vast majority of follow up discussion get ignored due to lack of time to respond to them before the AMA dies or the host gets bored and leaves. Also, many people only care about "getting noticed" by a celebrity and not actually asking something useful or thought-provoking.
2) As others have said, it usually ends up being advertising or serving some other agenda. It takes time and effort to respond to AMA questions, so most hosts only do it because they think they can get something of greater value, and that also rewards doing the bare minimum such as only answering easy questions or closing the AMA after a fairly short time.
3) Reddit and HN have drastically different cultures - while small subreddits might be ok, any large reddit community quickly devolves to the point intelligent conversation is impossible through a thick miasma of 'ironic' shitposting, juvenile humour, and general idiocy. You can't import cultural features from somewhere like that without risking harm to HN. I don't want it to turn into another Reddit.
Because I have no interest in reading them, so from my point of view they would be polluting the newsfeed and making it more difficult to find interesting articles.
> Are you sure that all the AMA buried instead of not just happening?
If they are getting buried then that would kind of prove my point that readers of HN don't want to see them here.
> I don't get your hostility toward AMA.
I'm not hostile, I just have no personal interest in them. As I said, Reddit is the perfect place for them because those who want to read them can go the AMA sub Reddit and read them and those who don't can ignore them. Then everyone is happy.
TBH I don't really understand why you would want them on HN. Surely it's better for those who like them for them to be on a sub Reddit. That way, when you fancy reading an AMA you can just go to the sub Reddit and browse AMA's to your hearts content.
You know, it's not that hard to skip over articles that you aren't interested in. If enough others are that it makes it to the front page, then by definition it is the kind of thing that people here are interested in. I myself am only interested in maybe 5% of the articles that make it to the front page; I suspect I'm not alone in that.
They generally are just promotional content from what i remember most the time. I think that would be a bit too tacky for this forum if that were to become a regular occurrence.
People are free to post anything they want on Hacker News, it's then up to the community, via upvotes and downvotes to decide if they want to see it. If you don't see AMA on Hacker News it's because people who read Hacker News, in aggregate, don't want to see AMA on Hacker News.
Simple.