this opens my eyes, TIL some people on HN have the ability to downweight a comment (which is not equivalent to downvoting)
just imagine how much of the HN comment section is manipulated by these elites
i guess some YC-investor isn't happy that us regulars are devaluing his investment and downranks negative comments so that people will give Fig a try after reading bunch of good ones
I don't think this is the proper use of the word. These are just people with vested interest in making a product more popular - it has nothing to do with any "elite."
"a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society."
the people who downranked my comments, were indeed elites, because they're a select group of privileged users with the ability to downrank
millions visit HackerNews every day
when those people see Fig ad here, first thing they do is check what the people are saying about it in the comment section
now, imagine that instead of real feedback, you're mostly seeing cherry-picked comments praising the product
it certainly shapes your opinion of the product and makes you more likely to try
I don't know why you are 'a regular' if you have such a toxic opinion of and attitude towards HN.
Also although this is not going to sway you, I at least want to mention it as I found it interesting when I came across this - see the response and embedded search link in the FAQ question "Are negative stories about YC suppressed on HN?" here [1]
Edit: also want to note that I'm thankful for you and others who bring up the privacy issues because I likely would have looked at the fig.io page, thought 'hey this looks cool' and upvoted the post without thinking much further... which is likely where a lot of the upvotes come from. So IMO putting things more lightly (even in your original response 9 days ago) would have sufficed. Perhaps if you had qualified what you meant by fig relying on "free labour" (it just sounds like a hectic accusation) your comment would have stayed at the top. Though overall I agree it doesn't seem like the kind of comment that should have been suppressed and it's good to push back against that a bit.
Most lurkers and users think YC companies make it to the front page organically and based on merit alone.
Other than that, YC companies have to compete for attention on HN along with everyone else, and I can tell you that most find it maddeningly difficult.
In some ways we use moderation power to YC startups' disadvantage - we moderate criticisms of YC startups less, not more, than usual (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
For example, the tedious angry-generic-repetitive sort of subthread that tends to get upvoted on most common topics is exactly the kind of thing we downweight as part of standard moderation, but we do that less when a YC startup is the topic. That's not because such discussion is any higher-quality in those cases (it isn't), but rather because people are quick to jump to the conclusion that we're doing nefarious things and we need to be able to answer those concerns in good conscience.
The fact that there's all this drama about one such subthread having gotten downweighted is actually an indication of how we don't do that. It happened, but only by mistake.
But if some users can down-weight comments and that happens on a thread about a YC company, I hope you can see why it would raise some concerns. I personally didn’t know some users had this ability.
It doesn't work perfectly though—the system is just too complex. In the case we're talking about, the user (not mod) who downweighted the comment was quite aware of both those rules and of their precedence. They just didn't know that Fig was a YC startup. There are thousands of YC startups and people can't remember them all.
Since mistakes are inevitable, I think all we can do is be open when they happen, fix them if we can, and explain our general principles are. That's what I've been trying to do in this case, and if there's a question I haven't answered yet, I'd be happy to. None of this is secret.
Actually the dream would be to have a community system that could regulate itself without any such special moderation, and the experiments I described upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227642) are all about inching in that direction, but it's just a hard problem that we have no general solution for.
This is the first time I've seen something like this on HN though, so if anything it might show how good the HN policies normally are. I just wasn't aware that some members of the community are more equal than others; now that it is clear and communicated, I can make better decisions myself.
The intention is to try to inch in the direction of a more self-regulating community while improving the quality of the discussions. Improved discussion quality is by far the most important thing and as far as I can tell this experiment is a big success in that department, so the essence of the HN is definitely not being diluted by it. If it were, we'd stop it immediately.
Not sure if that helps or not!
Edit: if anyone wants to see a typical example, here's a top subthread that one of the users we're talking about correctly marked as offtopic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31231858. That's the kind of pointless flamewar stuff that tends to get stuck at the top of a page. Downweighting it makes everything better, and having more eyeballs out there to catch it sooner is super helpful. That's the intention behind this experiment.
For example, it used to be that only moderators could unkill a [dead] post and restore it to full visibility. Then we started an experiment in letting non-moderators do that, and this turned into the 'vouch' feature which allows most HN users above a certain karma threshold to have a say in which posts get unkilled. That was the biggest success to date - it has made a big difference both in thread quality (many interesting comments become visible) and community happiness (there's less resentment about posts being dead than there used to be).
That was a great outcome, and we're always thinking about more possibilities for such things. The current experiment is very much in the same spirit. Personally I would love to find ways to extend these things to everyone (most likely above a certain karma threshold) but it's not often obvious how to do that.
Another example is the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), which gives submissions a random placement on HN's front page.