With all this crazy talk about the validity of these orange names I wanted to take a moment and attempt to view this from the other side of the table.

HackerNews is great. It provides a decent community from which YC can pull good ideas from, help innovation, and maybe if they are lucky make some money on their investments.

Particularly in the US market. As many of you know we are in some sort of a recession. This has caused countless articles to be written on "how to survive a recession as a startup" and "what all companies should be doing" and "what kind of tin cans allow the best storage of money in your backyard". You get the idea. Everyone is tightening their belts. YC is no different.

YC closed their Boston operations. This has caused a small downtown in population in the community as many have become disenchanted with the YC model. I would wager that this disenchantment is a good thing as the YC model is not a good fit for all ideas, companies, and/or people.

So what does all this hub-bub have to do with orange names and our future or lack there of? Well the orange names, like progress bars on linked in, and that burger king advert on Facebook that ate your friends, are a way of gaming users to providing more stimulus and/or content.

In HackerNews' case the orange names will give those who are "achievement whores" something to achieve. Its worked out very well for XBox360 games. I'm told World of Warcraft keeps adding more of them. I'm sure there are countless websites that have some form of achievement system. It is a proven model for increasing community involvement.

While this has worked in many other areas it will be interesting to see how it affects the community at large. Those who are more active (not me) will probably take more notice. Those who are less active (me) will probably continue on like this feature was never added. Although to its credit it will let me spot potential community leaders.

The downside of this whole thing. Is that without the orange names. The incentives. The community could slow down just like the recessions and potentially become unable to recover. Such is the case in fashion driven markets like technology.

Finally a more personal note. Orange on tan is not that easy to spot.