To be far this is HackerNews, a discussion board backed by a business accelerator program and home to startups and VCs alike.
If there's anywhere that should be okay with commercial promotion its here.
And that's what I like about the place. No where else on the internet can you find people at the ground level, promoting themselves and engaging in discussion. If you want to ask hard questions about the product, its hard to do it to a billboard in time square, but a lot easier to do against someone who's promoting it on HN.
Although I see where your comment is coming from, I think I should nitpick that the posts from actual startups backed by YC cannot be voted on nor have comments enabled. So unless they have the courtesy of showing up in an "unofficial" post, you cannot actually ask any questions, hard or otherwise. I wish I could link to it, but the best I can do is a screenshot[1].
More to the point: call me negative, but I think that fomenting a "post and run" style will lead to a situation in which you find it increasingly harder to talk to the actual creators. I'd rather not see "send link to HN" become yet another item on the self-promotion checklist.
Isn't that just the hiring posts? YC companies do regular posts as well which can get comments.
To be fair, you're right post and run is a bad concept, but a lot of that happens already and its simply downvoted before it ever makes it close to the frontpage.
If there's anywhere that should be okay with commercial promotion its here.
And that's what I like about the place. No where else on the internet can you find people at the ground level, promoting themselves and engaging in discussion. If you want to ask hard questions about the product, its hard to do it to a billboard in time square, but a lot easier to do against someone who's promoting it on HN.