I'd start a seed fund that specialized in startups driven by technical entrepreneurs and mentor them / provide them with connections to investors. HN would be the major channel for getting new startups to apply.
I'd change all amazon links to affiliate links (assuming they weren't affiliate links already, not that I've seen very many here). There are a boat load of posts devoted to books here, and lots of book recommendations going on outside those posts. The big book threads get linked to again and again.
The only other thing I can suggest that I think would appeal to the community would be to sell ads to ycombinator startups at ridiculously low rates. One to two ads per page, nothing obscene.
The problem with that would be that it would encourage spam. I would only have affiliate links in quality filtered lists (Top Picks/Most Recommended, Editors Choice, and personal lists that users could maintain on their profile page).
Advertising inherently seems to warp content, I think a premium membership option would put the incentive on satisfying user interests, rather than marketers.
It would only encourage PG to spam. :p (I think the idea behind this is that the site converts them to PG's amazon affiliate account, so he's making the referral bonuses.)
I was going to mention that, but I don't think it would mesh with HN that well. First, it would change everything to an affiliate link, not just amazon. More importantly, it doesn't seem to work with links you open in a new tab because it uses a lot of JS redirects (also, something people on HN may not find very attractive).
You definitely can. On average, you make around 6% on ANYTHING someone who clicks through puts in their shopping cart that session.
A friend of mine linked to a downloadable part of the tron soundtrack (a dollar or so a song). Someone bought the Adobe Creative Suite. My friend made $300 that day.
On a less "blind luck" side of the fence... if you have a blog with a few thousand hits per month, and you can just reference a product on Amazon on a few posts that month, you can get a pretty solid number of people clicking through.
HN is already monetized. It's one of a couple effective vehicles for YC awareness. I have no doubt that many applicants first encounter YC via HN.
That's a radically different monetization model than you might be thinking of, but many other shorter term models would have a negative impact on the HN experience and the YC promotion effect.
I don't know how most people find out about YC these days (the channels are certainly different for investors vs developers), but you are probably right that HN is not the first time they hear about YC, though it may be the first real contact with the YC crowd. My hunch is that most YC applicants spend some serious time on HN before applying. It's an effective channel for demonstrating the collective issues of interest to the YC community.
Interesting...in my techphilia, I found HackerNews through just following interesting stories, and landing on a singular discussion, which is now a daily obsession of going through the posted articles :D
This exposure is one of those hard to ROI measure functions (press) etc.
While I think HN should have this too, I think you're setting that cost pretty low. I've often wished there was a way to post (non-YC, non-startup) jobs to HN. It would be at least as good as if not more effective than what you get from a professional recruiter. I'm pretty certain a rate of $1500 would be reasonable. Especially given the huge savings in time that I don't have to spend filtering the total bozo applicants.
Unless the ethos of the site were changed, you'd have to have any features limited to gold members limited because they're computationally expensive, and not just to encourage payment -- the way reddit lets gold members have different sort orders on eir profiles, or view more comments in one page. Arbitrarily picking (i.e. "you can't see dead comments unless you're gold") would make the site worse.
I would turn HN itself into a startup company. Have some dedicated people working on the problems of scaling, adding new frequently requested features, and community management. It could be monetized by a mix of relevant ads and paid premium accounts allowing access to additional aspects of the site.
Easy, charge for a monthly fee to access the site. Period. Sort of along the lines of Metafilter's one time fee, in order to keep the commentary and content both relevant and interesting you could raise the barrier to entry.
I think this may harm the quality. I believe there are many students here who contribute a lot and if you set the barrier too high, they wouldn't be able to afford it.
As yet another college student, while I may not be loaded, I feel that the ability to do freelance work makes my life considerably more comfortable than the average student. A monthly fee wouldn't be that big of a deal.
Now, I say that because I have spent the last 18 months on HN. I'd be an easy conversion. The new signups would be less easy, as it's hard to see the true value in HN until you've spent time here.
I was reading Something Awful since about a year after they launched (late 90s). I never got around to registering for the forums. Now, I kick myself for not having been a part of and stuck around that community when it was that small.
Them charging (they have a one-time fee, but I think HN could definitely be monthly) cut down SEVERELY on the crap content, because only people serious enough to pay could post.
Having a free-read/comment-and-post-pay system I think would be great, even if you price it as low as $5-10/month.
If you honestly think a college student can't find $5 somewhere to paypal for a one-time fee, you're kidding yourself. And I say that as a college student.
If HN has reached some critical mass of readers I'd (in a craigslist-fashion) charge small fees for certain types of commercial posts (job postings, review my startup/webservice etc).
I know searching the site is something I want to do constantly. I would offer some sort of pay-for-search credits system or a membership $5-7 per month that simply lets me search.
