> In the wake of all this drama, a blog post titled "Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth" went viral and hit the top of Hacker News. Which you might have missed, because Hacker News — which is owned by Y Combinator — seems to have manually dropped the post lower in the rankings to suppress its visibility.
Is this true? I never thought HN moderated content critical of itself
8 of the current top 10 stories have been on the front page for longer than the submission that is critical of ycombinator and every single one of them has vastly fewer upvotes and comments. It's not even close, the story that is currently in position 6 has 1/4th the upvotes and 1/10th the comments. It has been on the front page since its submission.
It is impossible for the velocity, given any reasonable common sense examination, for the upvotes on that post to be greater than the story that was nuked after 2 hours.
There is no submission on the front page, some of which have been on the front page for over 24 hours, that has more upvotes, comments, or any conceivable rate of upvoting or commenting that even approaches 1/10th of the nuked story.
There is one submission that has an average of four upvotes per hour.
Assuming that upvotes fall off precipitously after leaving the front page, which I would say is a safe assumption, the nuked story had an upvote rate of several hundred per hour.
There's something fishy going on and that smell isn't the strong odor given off by Salt Water Dimmers, a submission to a barren wikipedia page about an obsolete technology with 13 upvotes and 5 comments that debuted on the front page, and has been there for several hours.
I'm not joking. On the front page of HN for several hours is a link to a 200-word wikipedia article about dimmers used in stage productions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687950
For what it's worth, stories about Boom (a ycombinator joint) SEEM to get nuked extremely rapidly when non-VC non-techbro domain experts start chiming in about what their chances for success actually are and how there's a 50% chance they're the next OceanGate and a 50% chance they're just a scam that got way too big for its britches.
Is this supposed to assauge the concerns of the public? Is dang not employed by, and thus a representative of, Y Combinator? There is every reason to believe he is directly responsible for protecting the interests of the company.
"Company investigated Company and found that Company did nothing wrong"
I don't really care about your concerns. If you are willing to lie for an employer we are ethically distant. I've seen no indication dang is willing to do that either and seen him being very open about things he didn't need to be. Also the way ownership works isn't so simple anymore as HN is YC. More like YC is HNs major sponsor these days.
I would hardly consider "moderating a public forum in accordance with your employer-mandated job description guidelines" to be "lying."
"dang" is a detail--the point is, if someone is being cut a paycheck by a company, the public is well within reason to believe that person has a job obligation to favorably represent the interests of that company.
The flags on hn are extremely powerful, so I don't doubt this. Just a few flags obliterate a post with tons of upvotes. It wouldn't take many people to kill it, and it doesn't require a conspiracy
I will frequently flag posts that are rage bait or where the comments are just the same few people arguing. I haven't flagged this one because I commented in it but it's a very low value post.
It's gossip rage bait to feel the feelings of superiority in the writers community vs VC land. It doesn't dive into any of those things, if it did that could be valuable, it's just reporting events to drive feelings.
I'm sure nobody has hard proof either way, but there's certainly an ongoing pattern of the symptom. This place only exists to promote YC, so you can decide for yourself which is the simplest explanation.
Is this true? I never thought HN moderated content critical of itself