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Comment by innocenttop | Hacker News Reader

Why is the story so downranked? Folks at HackerNews have something to do with it ?

It off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. I've turned that off now - this is obviously a serious article.

HN generally downvotes and/or flags anything that paints ycombinator in a bad light. As Altman was president of yc from 2014 to 2019 that could be why this is getting downvoted.

Articles critical of Airbnb, one of yc's biggest wins, also get flagged and taken down.

I'm not sure whether you meant this about moderator interventions or not, but our actual practice is the opposite:

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

As those comments explain, this has been the #1 rule of HN moderation from the beginning. See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

I don’t think the poster you responded to was claiming that moderators directly did this. The flagging system is open to bias from the community at large and certain types of articles(ex. Anything critical of the current admin) get a bunch of real users organically flagging them.

Yes, it's hard to tell sometimes but I've at least learned not to automatically take these personally. Well, partly learned.

I don't think anyone familiar with this community would assume positive bias towards Sam, Airbnb, or even YC anymore - it's quite the contrary, from my perspective, but of course everyone notices different things and has their own view. Ditto for political slants.

I dont assume positive bias, but I do assume that most negative things that get people irked are removed as a result of the mechanics of the flagging system.

Like, I dont really expect puff pieces for ycombinator or the like to get artificially pushed to the top, but I do expect that enough people who are feel culturally or financially invested in ycombinator to flag negative things into oblivion, especially as its completely reasonable that the population of users here has a much higher percentage of those folk than any random population sampling.

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