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you ever notice how most YC announcements have comments disabled?
Actual YC announcements do not have comments disabled.
We do tend to be more lenient when there's no evidence of organized manipulation, just friends/fans/users trying to be helpful and not realizing that it's actually unhelpful. What dedicated HN users tend not to realize is that such casual commenters usually have no idea how HN is supposed to work.
But this leniency isn't YC-specific. We're actually less lax when it comes to YC startups, for several reasons.
I'm not going to out people here but maybe it helps you to know that not everyone plays by the rules. Tbf I also understand that this is just really hard to enforce.
But as noted by freehorse, dang has stated it multiple times and I personally have not seen any threads memoryholed and would call out YC if they were.
Healthy skepticism plus the maturing industry of online propaganda and persuasion campaigns is where I would put Occam's razor a la "minimal assumptions". Every social media site has been manipulated at all levels, moderation notwithstanding, I see no reason to believe HN is immune to this.
It is not just a question of economics for YC to allow and even administrate this kind of manipulation, but of second- and third-order goals like consent/consensus manufacturing, reputation-building, shoring up investments by building "viral" interest, etc. These are immediate logical deductions from the patterns of behavior by humans and the bots that imitate them that are present everywhere on the internet these days.
But talking about repressive behaviour by mods against YC-related criticism specifically, I do not see that. I understand the prior would be that a popular forum run by YC would want to protect and censor in order to protect interests of the companies they back. I also had that prior. However, this is not "occam's razor", it is a prior. The time I have been around here I have not noticed this kind of behaviour happening though, while I have definitely noticed other kinds of stuff getting repressed, meaning that it is less likely that such repression would go unnoticed all the time. Thus I adjusted my understanding accordingly by shifting the prior according the data. If you find different examples I am willing to take them into account.