Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 - June 2021 (1234 comments)
(Edit: I'm adding some text here because people have been linking to this comment.)
This story was at #1 all day yesterday, in contradiction to HN's normal rules. That is, we bent over backwards to allow this story to have much more attention on HN than it would have gotten in a normal case. That's why it got 4000 upvotes and 1300+ comments and was the #1 story the entire day (https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2021-06-07).
Why did we do that? Because we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That is literally the first principle of HN moderation, and we stick to it strictly.
Less moderation does not mean no moderation, however. It does not serve the community, or the quality of HN, to repeat the same thing all over again the next day. Not having the same story repeat itself two days in a row is standard HN moderation.
Downweighting follow-ups in order to avoid repetition, is a bedrock principle of HN; otherwise the front page would be dominated by the same few stories every day. There are lots of past explanations about that at these links:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
We bent the rules considerably to allow the story to keep a prominent position it would not otherwise have had, for an entire day. I don't think it would be proper to do the same thing two days in a row, and indeed many users were emailing us to complain, when they thought that was about to happen.