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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

This is a media outlet reporting on an HN thread. The thread is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264. Note my pinned comment at the top there - I actually think some of the later comments make for interesting reading but for obvious reasons [1] we couldn't downweight the drama the way we usually would.

When media outlets report on HN threads we normally downweight those pretty heavily since they're just recycling content/discussion that already appeared here. In this case I'm downweighting it less than we normally would, in keeping with the core principle that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are part of the story [1].

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

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This isn't just about the HN comment, the reporter spoke to multiple people inside and outside of Stripe. In my experience, stories like this tend to be in the works for weeks and it's likely the HN comment popped up close to publication so it was quickly folded in, it's not the main thrust of the story.

Directly in the thread linked by dang the reporter from Protocol was soliciting people directly for a "potential story". It does not appear this was something previously being worked on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29394740

That's also possible, in any case, she found multiple, independent people willing to talk to her and was able to review their correspondences for authenticity. The main thrust of the story is not the HN comment.

Having skimmed the article I'd say that the main thrust of the story is the same as the main thrust of the HN thread, which is why this thread is substantially the same as the previous one.

For what is worth: I didn't even know what Protocol was prior to their offer to talk to me, which is publicly made in the original thread. So I never spoke with them and have no reason to.

Stripe replied to my post, I replied with the details, and moved on. I hope they improve their processes and the rest of the tech industry follow suit.

May I ask what justification they gave? If it is private I understand.

Potential doesn't imply it wasn't being worked on.

Maybe, but there's also a cottage industry of media articles mining HN for material, and those are not the best source for new HN discussion, for obvious reasons (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

From my perspective, the proof of the pudding is whether the HN discussion is substantially different from the previous one. In this case it isn't. The themes are the same and the comments look interchangeable, not counting the throwaway account drama in the previous one.

It looks like the title of this thread was changed since the first time I saw it to something that doesn't match the title of the article. This new headline doesn't seem very clear at all. "Losing an offer" conveys something very different from "rescinded an offer".

I changed it to the HTML doc title, which is a legit source of good titles on HN and often has the most accurate/neutral version (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).

(Submitted title was "Stripe applicants say that the company is rescinding offers after it makes them", which was either editorialized, against the site guidelines, or later changed by the publication.)

Why not change the headline to the actual article title?

'Stripe is on a hiring spree. But it's also rescinding job offers and angering engineers.'

There are several options for actual-article-title, including the HTML doc title. In this case I picked it over the heading on the page because it's less baity. That's often the case, so we often do that; it's a standard mod practice going back years, as you'll see if you scroll through the search link in my GP comment.

Please define baity. The title on the page isn't deceptive or vague.

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