Anyway, sadly (and obviously) this submission has been flagged, would be better to carry discussion to a lessly-YC controlled platform: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/3h7ivz/airbnb_h...
It's time you supplied some evidence (which you won't, because we don't do the things you say), or dropped this. Repeating the same falsehood ad nauseum is not legit.
The only thing that happened to the present post is that users flagged it, presumably because it was an obvious duplicate. We didn't see the post until a few minutes ago, and the only moderation we did was unkill it so discussion can continue. That's standard practice.
Every time? That's very much an exaggeration! Secondly, if you read my comment you'll see I did not accuse YC of flagging the story, I was myself thinking it was user flags (though, when one considers that flagging privileges are sometimes revoked... and only "good" users are left to flag, userflag starts to seem very much like a YC-flag - but that's a story for another day). Anyway, I do think I didn't choose my words very carefully, there's arguably some connotation of YC being `directly` involved in flagging in my comment, that was unintended.
Your oft-repeated claim/insinuation/smear that we censor anti-YC stories isn't true, nor fair, nor even reasonable, since to run HN that way would be stupid and the whole thing would have fallen apart years ago.
It's also mean—you have no idea how hard we work to make sure that stuff like that doesn't happen.
And in this case it was lazy as well: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=airbnb%20horror%20story&sort=b....
That's just not true though. Huge governments have survived through propaganda, brainwashing, etc. (not necessarily accusing YC of doing that, just making a point). Forums can persist in any direction you want if they're carefully and meticulously managed, one can partake in rampant banning, censoring, etc. and it'll all still be fine, it happens everywhere all the time.
Yes it fucking has.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10064782
This version uses a mobile link. The previous version includes a bunch of URLcruft.
In fact:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10064782
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10063756
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10063612
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10063555
It has had repeated submissions, and one previous submission has over 60 comments. It's probably being flagged as a dupe.
EDIT: Also, NYT has a paywall and some people auto-flag any NYT submission.
I wish you hadn't escalated this to usage of profanities, but it's all good.