HackerNews is a marketing channel for a technology investment firm.
Why should they care about balanced conversation? What if those balanced conversations somehow promote criticism of companies that they are involved with?
Why should they care about balanced conversation? What if those balanced conversations somehow promote criticism of companies that they are involved with?
It's not perfect but it puts every other fairly large public internet forum I've seen to shame.
Not everything has to be done for economic gain. If you want to pretend it's all a ruse to make more money then you are free to consider having such a robust discussion forum to be good PR for Y Combinator; it garners an enormous amount of goodwill and respect in the tech community.
And they do care about earnest thoughtful balanced conversation. There are plenty of posts critical of YC companies or PG or you name it that are not censored. Mods interact with the community regularly to enforce standards and curate post quality.
More logically, Ycomb gets a lot of prestige and "free" marketing from the quality and popularity of HN. It's in their interests to maintain and improve that quality. Besides, they're hardly going to lose clients because a couple of negative comments don't get downvoted into oblivion as swiftly as before.