Back on the topic, WD also manufactures media players, but surely not over a billion per year.
Well. I wouldn't care that much too.
BUT HN comment rely on an invisible karma value and if it is below a certain threshold, the accounts "suffers" aka, certain functions have no visible effect. Then suddenly upvoting other comments/stories doesn't do anything (looks fine to you, but doesn't increase the value for everyone but you) and your comments start with an (invisible) negative score, so you will find your comments instantly on the bottom, almost no matter how many upvotes. It's an intransparent system, and it used to be more transparent, when HN was still open source software. Correct me if I am wrong, but that's how I experienced it and put together the puzzle. I certainly would prefer if there would be only upvotes (like Facebook) and no downvotes/flagging - it doesn't work anymore, the community got too big and changed.
Assuming I understand you, that's wrong. PG always had two different versions of HN. The open-source one was a working subset of the production one, but only a subset, and there were always aspects that weren't public—necessarily so, to avoid abuse and gaming of the system. Moreover there were always downvotes and flags, or at least from very early on.