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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21337594

/feedbackhn It really sucks when an active discussion on the front page is nuked in favor of a dead discussion on an article that's ready to fall off the second page.

Some conspiratorial minds might even suggest that this may of been intentional seeing that GitLab is a member of Y Combinator

The first rule of HN moderation is to moderate less, not more, when YC startups are at issue:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

That doesn't mean we don't moderate at all, just less. For example, in this case, the repost was obviously a dupe by a large margin, so we marked it as a dupe. But when people complained about that, we were more likely to bend the rules because Gitlab is a YC startup. If it were an unrelated company, we would have been more likely to say something like "look you guys, this is standard practice and it's not a borderline call" and left the repost marked as a duplicate.

My apologies dang, I didn't mean to directly insinuate that this was happening, just that it could lead credence to those rumors.

Thanks for taking care of the situation, and for further demonstrating what top notch moderation should look like

edit: Thank you for explaining the policy! I think it's excellent.

I suspect dang knows there will always be people that accuse him of conspiring with YC companies, and the best thing he can do is to just keep doing his job.

I also suspect dang knows that majority of people on HN are grateful for his moderation services.

I pointed out the dupe when there was only a single comment on this story. I thought I was being helpful, giving a link to a bunch of great discussion. Now I regret it.

My apologies if it seemed targeted at you; your comment was at the top and the post was marked as a dupe. The feedback is not against you.

It was marked as a duplicate because it was a repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21344575, which spent nearly 15 hours on HN's front page and got over 200 upvotes. Marking reposts like that is standard moderation. If we didn't, the front page would be full of duplicates and the comments full of complaints about them.

It seems like there's more energy than usual for continuing to discuss this one, though, so I'm happy to bend the rule. It will take a few minutes to effect a three-way merge, so bear with me.

Edit: ok, I merged the relevant comments from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346318 into here. But I don't think it makes sense to merge yesterday's discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21337594). That one is already historical since the story has changed. So what we'll do is update the title to incorporate the new information, and leave a link to the older thread at the top. I'm going to mark this subthread about dupeiness as off topic though.

If anyone still has concerns, let us know and we'll see what we can do.

@dang, can you merge these threads instead of having this one marked as a [dupe] and hidden?

Working on it.

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