That's not bad per-se IMHO, after all still HN even with the "ghost news" appearing and all the rest is a decent place.
What is a big issue IMHO is that, given it's starting to be obvious how important is to have a completely neutral HN-style news site for hackers world-wide, nobody tried to do a serious no-profit to create a replacement that is able to guarantee a more democratic and not interested management.
So YC does a good job at taking HN not too business-driven, but still HN community does a very poor job at trying to start something completely not-business-related.
The problem is that if someone from HN were to start a news aggregator site competitor it wouldn't be long before they started looking for profiting posibilities (people reading HN like making companies, in case you didn't notice :-) ). At least HN doesn't run ads or has a "HN Gold" program (yet, this comment may backfire though, seeing how pg is reading the thread).
I think we'll be fine though. YC doesn't really own HN, the people here submitting and commenting stuff do; if it gets too compromised eventually most folks will migrate to somewhere else.
It's also invite only, and I don't know about you, but I can't see the value in spending a lot of time trawling through there, looking to see if there's a name I recognize from HN, and then try to figure out if I know that person well enough from posting here to ask them for an invite. And that's even assuming people would use the same name on lobste.rs that they use here anyway.
That was a failed attempt from my side too, because you can't just trow a site there, and don't handle the community, create a super-partes organization, and so forth. My problem is lack of time unfortunately.
I'll retry with something in Italian language soon that is smaller and more manageable, and much needed.
Make sure the people want it; I'm for example native from Spain, and there's nothing that comes close to HN in Spanish, but I know an attempt to make something like that would fail miserably because the people simply don't want it (that's probably also why it doesn't exist)
In Italy it is much needed, and apparently there is demand, not because we need to discuss the same news in Italian language. Every semi-decent programmer can read-write some basic English. The point is to work in a "show HN" alike way to create the community that can be used to found new startups. Basically it's an economic/startup-dynamics need, not an actual news need.
Well honesty there is also a small news need, that's news relevant to Italy that would not have a place it, like startup days, new rounds of italian stuff, and so forth.
What is a big issue IMHO is that, given it's starting to be obvious how important is to have a completely neutral HN-style news site for hackers world-wide, nobody tried to do a serious no-profit to create a replacement that is able to guarantee a more democratic and not interested management.
So YC does a good job at taking HN not too business-driven, but still HN community does a very poor job at trying to start something completely not-business-related.