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.