You seem to be under a mistaken impression of how the system here works. Upvotes are an important signal but far from the only one. If HN were to go by upvotes alone, it would consist of little more than sensational flamewars about the same few hot topics over and over again (plus tons of meta drama, as in this subthread). This is a weakness of the upvoting system. Lots of past explanation about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so….

Since HN’s mandate is not to be that, we have to have countervailing mechanisms to compensate for that weakness. Otherwise the system would get stuck in one of its failure modes. The countervailing mechanisms include things like flags, software mechanisms (including automated up- and down-weights) and moderation (including manual downweights and other interventions). All this is happening all the time. If it weren’t, HN would be a completely different place.

None of this is secret; it’s not all transparent in the sense that we don’t publish a full log of all the factors, but we’re happy to answer specific questions.

That’s not what happened. I’ve explained in detail what did happen, many times, so this doesn’t seem to be about facts.

We cut users a lot more slack when they’re making shit up about HN, YC, YC startups, and so on, but the amount of slack we cut is nonetheless finite and it’s time you stopped.

Lest we hear more about how you’re being repressed: people criticize HN, YC, and YC startups all the time here with zero problems. You, however, have derailed more than one discussion now by inundating it with dozens of sensational, false, and/or offtopic comments. That is not what HN threads are for, and even though we moderate HN less when YC startups are the topic, we eventually have to draw a line.

Actually I have the impression that you’re rather a good commenter in general and this isn’t personal in any way, so if you want to fix this, it won’t be hard.

YC companies are not given preferential treatment, with three exceptions, which are clearly defined in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html): Launch HN posts (https://news.ycombinator.com/launches), job ads (https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs), and alumni usernames being displayed in orange to other alumni.

Other than that, YC companies have to compete for attention on HN along with everyone else, and I can tell you that most find it maddeningly difficult.

In some ways we use moderation power to YC startups’ disadvantage – we moderate criticisms of YC startups less, not more, than usual (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu…).

For example, the tedious angry-generic-repetitive sort of subthread that tends to get upvoted on most common topics is exactly the kind of thing we downweight as part of standard moderation, but we do that less when a YC startup is the topic. That’s not because such discussion is any higher-quality in those cases (it isn’t), but rather because people are quick to jump to the conclusion that we’re doing nefarious things and we need to be able to answer those concerns in good conscience.

The fact that there’s all this drama about one such subthread having gotten downweighted is actually an indication of how we don’t do that. It happened, but only by mistake.

They definitely don’t get preferential treatment outright.

But if some users can down-weight comments and that happens on a thread about a YC company, I hope you can see why it would raise some concerns. I personally didn’t know some users had this ability.

You’re right. I would put it this way: the rule “we moderate less when YC or a YC startup is being criticized” has to take precedence over the rule “we downweight generic and/or offtopic subthreads when we notice them at the top of a page”. And it does take precedence—it is literally the #1 moderation principle here.

It doesn’t work perfectly though—the system is just too complex. In the case we’re talking about, the user (not mod) who downweighted the comment was quite aware of both those rules and of their precedence. They just didn’t know that Fig was a YC startup. There are thousands of YC startups and people can’t remember them all.

Since mistakes are inevitable, I think all we can do is be open when they happen, fix them if we can, and explain our general principles are. That’s what I’ve been trying to do in this case, and if there’s a question I haven’t answered yet, I’d be happy to. None of this is secret.

We’ve been doing experiments for many years with the intention of extending moderation abilities to broader segments of the community. Some of these experiments end up getting dropped, while others end up as official features on the site.

For example, it used to be that only moderators could unkill a [dead] post and restore it to full visibility. Then we started an experiment in letting non-moderators do that, and this turned into the ‘vouch’ feature which allows most HN users above a certain karma threshold to have a say in which posts get unkilled. That was the biggest success to date – it has made a big difference both in thread quality (many interesting comments become visible) and community happiness (there’s less resentment about posts being dead than there used to be).

That was a gr