Hmmm. I won't repeat my qualms with AirBnB. I'm afraid that this comment will get downvoted/banned in a bit, and like any negative post/discussion about AirBnB, the discussion will mysteriously disappear from the front page…
I only see articles in my comment history from over a year ago. Search here isn't great, e.g. I can't find the article where PG himself commented on something I said.
Here's a few where I participated https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7923849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7939414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8222687
In this one I reacted to someone else with the same impression https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9332889 I asked for clarification on the policy, instead I got a downvote.
Since that time, I'm keeping quiet.
I appreciate that you don't want to "tick anyone off here", and you haven't, but you have said some things that aren't true. I think I've answered most of them at [1], but there's at least one other. It isn't true that we single anti-Airbnb stories out. We don't treat them any other way than comparable stories about something else.
I think there's a general phenomenon affecting this. Once startups become hyper-successful, there's a noticeable HN backlash against them. Perhaps this is because they're no longer the underdog. Airbnb and Uber (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9933165) are clearly in this category, and we've noticed others.
The trouble with such backlashes is that the discussions they lead to are super repetitive. Even more than the indignation, it's the repetitiveness that makes them unsuitable for HN.
Currently, the story above it has 57 points, 1 comment, and was posted 4 hours ago. This one has 125 points, 45 comments, and was posted 1 hour ago.
We penalize indignation and/or sensational stories unless there is something unusually interesting about them. Indignation does not gratify intellectual curiosity, which is the mandate of this site. It does, though, attract large numbers of upvotes—most consistently. That's a weakness of the voting system and a countervailing mechanism is needed. If we didn't have one, indignation would dominate HN, and that would be fatal. So we can't go by upvotes alone.
Second, we don't censor posts for being anti-YC. That's literally the #1 rule of HN moderation—it's the first thing pg explained to me. We get accused of doing so anyway, of course, but it's important to be able to answer in good conscience. So when an indignation thread is YC-related, we may still penalize it, but always less than we otherwise would.
(Why do we penalize them less instead of just staying completely hands-off? Because that wouldn't be good for HN. There are a bunch of concerns we have to balance, and giving anti-YC threads carte blanche would neglect those other concerns, e.g. the quality of the front page. It would also be a truck-sized loophole that people would soon exploit.)
Third, there is software to detect flamewars and downweight such threads. Since indignation breeds indignation, that often kicks in on such posts.
Finally, anything beyond the above is the effect of user flags. This sort of thread always gets a lot of flags as well as upvotes. If you see a post whose score is growing and yet whose rank is falling, that's usually because it's attracting flags as well.