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Comment by thiscatis | Hacker News Reader

Very disappointing and probably the least honest and transparant update from YC.

Even YC is cowed into silence by the might of China. Understandably so, even if somewhat cowardly. Does YC want China to boycott or otherwise disable YC companies? Does YC want to threaten any future relationship with China? No. So they keep mum as to their real reasons.

Why disturb waters unnecessarily? YC's statement seems more like "let's wait for a better time" than self-censorship.

If YC truly saw no chance for YC-China in the future, then I don't doubt they would come out and say so. However, that's a pretty strong statement, and I don't think anyone can make such a prediction. There is always a chance for a more serendipitous time in the future.

Please do me the courtesy of writing a reply if you're going to downvote. Thank you.

What's dishonest/opaque about this?

YC is generally Bay Area-only, and after consideration they decided to stick with that.

There's no real reason why given. It seems that HN's "No politics" policy flows over to their blog updates as well.

HN doesn't have a no politics policy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

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

Edit: maybe I should add that we do moderate posts that are just political, i.e. don't have an intellectually curious angle, as well as threads that depart from the path of curious discussion and sink into flames.

I think you should adopt your "moderate with a light touch on sensitive YC-affecting topics" tactics for this thread.

Indeed I am. This thread is much worse than we'd normally allow.

You do understand that YC China would have been an enormous change, right? They barely started doing NYC this year.

The default answer is simply "no"/"not right now"; not a ton of explanation required.

The reason given was "change of leadership", i.e., from Sam Altman to Geoff Ralston. Interestingly, Geoff wrote: "we are just working on launching YC China and I'll work hard to make sure Qi Lu has everything he needs to make that go well" after he was appointed, so it doesn't seem like he started out with different ideas.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19969490

> "No politics"

Maybe because politics was not involved and it was purely an operational capacity decision? I know it's not as fun as silly conspiracy theories.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com