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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

We go out of our way not to kill stories and comments that are critical of YC or YC-funded startups. When such posts break the HN guidelines, we may penalize them, but always less than we would if the story were about something else. That's a pretty big deal around here—it's literally the first rule of HN moderation.

Beyond that, we'd need to know what post you're talking about. If you'd like to provide a link, we can look into it.

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This comment is shown as fine to me, whereas it really is dead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10245424

I'd love to hear a non-malicious explanation for that.

That comment was killed by a spam filter. Those generate false positives sometimes. We've fixed that and also unkilled the comment.

In the future, please do what the HN guidelines ask and email such questions to us at hn@ycombinator.com. I only saw this thread by accident.

I'm sure you can see that the post linking to the (simplifying) anti-YC blog being accidentally killed by spam filter can raise questions about whether it was really an accident. I'm not saying it was not - I'm just saying the bayesian probability of this being an accident doesn't look that great to me.

Imagine making a scoring system for domains that that takes into account flags and votes on comments that include said domain. Also, your post had a word written in ALL CAPS, arguably two. You can see other comments linking to the same domain at around the same time [1] that aren't marked as spam.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/

HN not only shadow bans commenters, they will also poison placement of comments (algorythmically) in a sub thread based on who writes the comment.

We nearly always inform people when we ban their accounts: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....

Lots of software affects both story and comment rankings. "Poison" is a rather tendentious way to describe that. HN's goal is high quality in all things, to the extent it's possible. That doesn't just happen by default; systems are necessary, and it gets harder as numbers grow.

"Poison" is a rather tendentious way to describe that

NB...The words in my signature didn't come from a random sampling of the dictionary...they were from a screen grab of HN moderation tools...

On the topic of changing subjects, no not really.

Those words are outrageously inflamatory.

Nobody found them inflammatory when they sat in the public HN source code for years, but once they appeared in an accidental screenshot, they became outrageous!

We're happy to answer good-faith questions about HN moderation, but this seems like trying to stir up drama.

The verbiage of 'poisoning the well' is a well understood figure of speech.

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