No. There's a mild software downweight on bloomberg.com the same way there is for other major media websites, but that's all. I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by 'censored', but there wasn't any moderator intervention nor any software penalty other than the one I just described.
I'd be happy to turn the penalty off, but that title is impossibly baity and I'm not quite sure what to do about that. Also, other than a weird iris-scanning orb and something-something cryptocurrency, there really isn't much information there. Bloomberg is usually better than that title, which makes me wonder if they're compensating.
Sometimes the HN mods will “re-bump” a story to see if it will get more votes. Would be interesting to know what they did in this case. The moderation of the thread about YC Founders skipping the vax line was unquestionably biased in favor of YC.
Literally the first principle of HN moderation is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That doesn't mean we don't moderate at all, but we're extremely conscious and careful about it. The first step in onboarding any HN moderator is to instill in them the fear of god, hellfire, and the internet about this.
If you want to share what you specifically saw about what specific thread, I could try to reconstruct what we did. Just in general, though, it's extremely easy to read sinister patterns into this material, for the simple reason that there are more than enough data points to support any pattern. This is the curse of the von Neumann elephant (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Or to put it another way: "unquestionably biased" is internet speak for "I saw a thing that I thought kind of looked like that".
> Would be interesting to know what they did in this case
I'm afraid the rather boring answer is that we did nothing because we didn't see it (until now, 18 hours later). It's not the sort of article we'd put in the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), because there's little new information there. The authors seemed to have "caught" these guys in the act of working on their startup, cornered them for an interview, but didn't manage to squeeze much out of them. So I think we'd probably all be better off waiting for the thing to actually launch. That's one of the more reliable HN principles: "there's no harm in waiting" - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Dang, your use of rhetoric here is flaimbait. Where I have moderated, your behavior would not be tolerated as a user. What you’re doing here is purely for your own entertainment using the security of your privileged status.
Here is your post to where you admit to making major modifications to a post that had a title the slightest bit critical of YC:
That link shows the opposite of what you say. I was careful to moderate that thread much less than we would have normally. Under normal circumstances, we downweight ordinary Twitter drama off HN's front page because it isn't intellectually interesting. In that case we intervened much less, exactly in keeping with the principle: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... The submission stayed on HN's front page for many hours, and the title edit I did was precisely in keeping with the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and fully explained at the time.
I certainly don't mean to offend you, but a phrase like "your replies are unwelcome" doesn't take away others' right to respond in a public forum (imagine if it could!), and doesn't change my responsibility to correct the record when people make false statements about how HN functions. The good will of the community is the only asset that this place has. It's my job to tend to that by answering questions and addressing criticisms—which means admitting them when they're right, and showing how they aren't when they're not.
You have a point about rhetoric though. This type of posting is so repetitive that I do sometimes try to mix it up with different metaphors and phrasings. Some of it probably does get a little provocative at times, and I apologize if it landed that way in this case. I often edit my posts to tone them down when I feel like they went a little too far. It wouldn't be better, though, to post mechanically all day—it would eliminate the human element, which would not be in the spirit of this place, and it's much better for the community when there's variation.
> I certainly don't mean to offend you, but a phrase like "your replies are unwelcome" doesn't take away others' right to respond in a public forum (imagine if it could!), and doesn't change my responsibility to correct the record when people make false statements about how HN functions.
Dang, I think we disagree on what “correcting the record” entails, or what even is “correct.” I also don’t appreciate the continued downvotes I’m getting in these discussions with you. I just want you to know personally that your responses towards me are unwelcome.
