
Palmer Luckey secretly funding meme army on Twitter, Reddit - kefka
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/542dhf/palmer_luckey_the_facebook_billionaire_secretly/
======
carsongross
Literally, the guy has fuck you money.

------
throwanem
The Reddit post is just a link to a Daily Beast article which makes the actual
claim, plus a lot of uninformed speculation in the Reddit comments. Maybe
change the URL in this post?

(Not that the Daily Beast article is especially good, and I don't mean that in
a political way - it's just hard to make out the course of events they're
positing.)

------
threeseed
This was pretty extraordinary news.

It's been fine that company leaders take political positions because they have
all been reasonably centrist (with leanings left/right). But Trump is the most
provocative and polarising candidate we've seen in quite some time. And to not
just support him but actively engage in this way is really unusual.

I can't imagine Zuckerberg is going to be at all impressed by this.

~~~
kefka
I mean, this can devolve in "Trump sux, Hillary sux"... but that's what I
wanted to avoid.

Think of this as a VC-Founder issue of differing politics with regards to
social media. How do you balance this? Do you just shut up and acquiesce when
the VC tells you to do something? Do you still voice your opinion?

Luckey sold his company to Facebook. Facebook's CEO is a Clinton supporter,
and it appears that Palmer Luckey is a Trump supporter. How much say does
Zuckerberg have over Luckey, considering that Luckey is still the "face" of
Oculus (even if the company was sold)?

How do you balance these issues when there is a political rift(pun aside) like
this?

------
room271
Can the mods explain why this was removed from the frontpage?

It is clearly of interest to the community.

~~~
kefka
Hmm..

I've had the same reaction when I modified/hacked/made the python ML code to
fix Thalmic Myo's armband so Linux and the rest of us could use it. _1

In that case, YC censors all articles about member companies with a script.
Makes sense, to protect their income, but altogether sleezy without some sort
of disclosure as to why (would have been nice to see "article not allowed due
to YC ownership").

The only thing I can guess is there's some sort of fiduciary something, that
caused the mods to dupe-delete.

_1 [http://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-
free-...](http://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free-
developer-access/)

~~~
dang
> _In that case, YC censors all articles about member companies with a
> script._

Holy magoly, that is 100% untrue. The truth is the opposite: when there are
articles critical of YC companies, we are careful to moderate them less, not
more, than we normally would. That's the first principle of HN moderation and
was literally the first thing pg said when he was showing me how to moderate
the site. I hadn't even had a chance to grab a chair before he blurted it out.

We wouldn't dream of doing anything like what you describe—not because it
wouldn't work (though it wouldn't), but because as members of the community
ourselves, we wouldn't want to be treated that way.

It's always possible to get an answer to a question about a specific post.
It's better to send such things to hn@ycombinator.com because (a) they're off-
topic here, and (b) we might not see them otherwise. Please note that phrase
_specific post_. Without specific links, it's harder to clear things up.

~~~
kefka
It was this (hn:kefka) account when I posted the data about the Myo. I posted
it multiple times, with the word "Thalmic" in there. All were killed instantly
on creation. A few minutes could pass, and a user-based flag kill would be
understandable.

In my experiences, instant decisions like that are results of a script.
Obvious assumptions were that it was HN's script, protecting HN's assets.

You've got one heck of a community here. I try to positively add... But I know
we don't see eye-to-eye on quite many things.

~~~
dang
I like that you feel that way about the community, and it's fine if we don't
always see eye-to-eye. HN wouldn't be as good a community if we all did. The
main thing we're trying for is assuming good faith in such cases (which isn't
easy. I don't find it easy when criticized, and don't expect anyone else to.)

From
[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=kefka](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=kefka),
it looks like your account lost story submission privileges in Feb 2014 after
having posted a bunch of stories that weren't appropriate for HN. That was at
least 9 months before you posted anything about Thalmic/Myo, so I'm sure that
the latter had nothing to do with it. (I'm also sure because we'd never take
submission privileges away for that reason.)

In Dec 2015 we restored story submission privileges to your account, probably
because we saw
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537529](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537529),
which was a solid submission. If an account is posting the occasional
substantive story—especially ones that other users aren't submitting—we err on
the side of restoring privileges.

~~~
kefka
Thank you for clearing that up, dang.

It was indeed a script that stopped those stories, but not in the nefarious
way I suspected. I'm honestly not sure which stories triggered the "no
submission" flag, but it does make sense.

I would like if we could personally see flags like that (say on our user
page). I've never been a fan of hell-* removal of privileges, only to think of
worse cases like this.

Thank you for being honest and frank about this.

-Josh

