Regarding the "silent" down-weighting, unless I've misunderstood, I think that's a very bad idea. I think all moderation activity should be transparent to the users of the community.
> we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or its startups are involved
I think it's great that you have this as an explicit policy! Thanks for all your work moderating this community.
Aside: I found the Airbnb post interesting because I recently saw a map showing a massive rise in the number of apartments for rent as home owners move off Airbnb. I'm in the market for a new rental, and I totally didn't see this surge in supply and consequent price-drop coming. So this topic is interesting to me. But, more generally, the particularly "harsh" externalities of the pandemic on specific tech markets/startups is interesting to me, and I saw this Airbnb post as another data point to add to my mental models of how pandemics like this affect various markets. I think the fact that it got 15 points in 30 minutes is evidence that some non-trivial subset of other HN users felt this way too. In any case, transparent moderation would probably help the community to inform you of accidental bad moderation choices (not to say you should always go with the crowd's decisions, of course).