It used to be that kind of forum.
I think it's a bit unfair to poke fun at names and such, but the commenters in this thread are performing the exact same process of evaluation and understanding as yourself, except the only difference is their information is quite limited.
Yes, it's stupid and unwise to draw conclusions from incomplete information, but for the most part, that's what people do and (given the information), that's all they can do.
If you want to avoid this in the future, I would say better PR and more information would help people avoid making such silly initial judgments and help to properly manage their expectations.
Besides, if most people have low expectations for these startups, underpromising will only help in the future when they do deliver. And then you can deliver your I-told-ya-sos.
There's a new batch of YC startups every 6 months. The startups were about the same quality a year ago. And yet after demo day a year ago the top comment on HN wasn't a content-free dismissal with 86 points. I know both HN and the startups very well, and what's changing here is HN, not the startups. The site has grown so much that the median user is significantly dumber and meaner than a year ago.
I've been thinking a lot over the last several months about how to deal with this. One of the solutions I'm considering is to get rid of points on comments, and that would have worked well here. Fnid2's comment, as he more or less admitted himself, was just a throwaway remark. But displaying points transformed it into a rallying cry leading a mob.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=522675
2008 Summer Demo Day - 587 days ago (First comment = snarky remark about the company logos... sound familiar?):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=276333
2007 Demo Day - 957 days ago (Half the thread is [dead] and full of bickering similar to this one):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269
So no, HN did not ever do better. It only seems worse because instead of 2 complaints about company logos, HN is now 10x the size and you see 20 complaints. There's still a lot of great articles posted, HN "Ask/Tell" discussions, and it's still full of intelligent people. However, it takes wisdom to know when to shut one's mouth, and intelligence != wisdom.
I've been here about 3 years myself, and that's why I try to stay logged out and make my bookmark to HN = /best. It's just gotten far too noisy and I was wasting tons of time keeping up with the sheer volume of (both good and bad) comments.