No admin touched this post. It dropped in rank because of user flags and the flamewar detector, which is algorithmic and treats all posts the same way.
HN admins don't penalize posts for being anti-YC or anti-YC-startup.
HN admins don't penalize posts for being anti-YC or anti-YC-startup.
Indignation is a common driver of these. Look at the top comment in this thread, beginning "What a shitty", or the one that, with admirable forthrightness, says "Reading that article makes me furious". Such discussions do often lead to flamewar-like behavior (e.g. the argument about the definition of 'community'), so "flamewar detector" isn't exactly wrong, either.
We do look several times a day at the stories that are penalized by this software, because sometimes there are genuine false positives that need rescuing. I wouldn't say that this article and thread rise to that level, though.
A little meta, that an algo said to flag the thread down while the airbnb host in the linked article likely got flagged down by an alogrithm.
We really don't have the slightest basis for that assessment, do we?
That highlights the deep problem with posts like this: they invariably have only one side of the story. That's not the authors' fault—why shouldn't they tell their side of the story? But it makes objective discussion impossible. Since the internet abhors a vacuum, what rushes in to replace the missing information is speculation and rage, and those things make for poor HN discussions no matter what the topic.