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Comment by chrisacky | Hacker News Reader

PG already responded in the post. (He got downvoted heavily so his post is muted):

    As we say in the guidelines,
    http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    HN is a news site, not a forum for people with issues with companies we've funded
    (even when concealed as Ask HNs). So I'm killing this.
    If you have an issue with Dr Chrono, please contact them directly.

If you ask me, there wasn't anything wrong with the question. The guy reached out to the startup community for answers about a startup company... We regularly discuss other companies here... (Would the post had stayed if it was linked to external blog?)

With that said however, I think that over half of the comments in the thread were just getting ready to arm their pitchforks anyway so the constructiveness of any discussion was probably already over.

Clickable to original story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7178004

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I'm going to suggest something possibly inflammatory, but I promise I say it with only the best intentions. There's something wrong with the fact that such a big forum for hackers/startups is controlled mainly by individuals who also run a startup incubator. There're issues of conflicts of interest here through and through. This thread is perhaps the best example of things going wrong -- hellbanning/rankbanning (ask michaelochurch about that) is another thing, along with too many threads about serious issues worth discussing getting killed.

Maybe we should move to a place where the power hierarchy is not as objectionable. As earlier suggested, maybe a place moderated by trusted HN members (I'm thinking patio11, potatolicious, grellas, etc.) - we can get started here if there's any interest http://www.reddit.com/r/truehn

You should suggest something a little more provocative: there is something broken at YC.

For some very strange reason, this reads exactly like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929705, down to the PG retort about the guidelines.

Why do I say something is broken with YC? They should be inculcating certain values, including not leaving customers high and dry (which is what would happened here and in other cases had the posts not reached the front page). You may argue, correctly, that the customers in question were made whole, but that's only because HN worked as a forum for airing grievances about YC companies.

I think drdal showed a lot of courtesey in posting his complaint here. He had also made it quite clear that he had reached out to DrChrono several times. In comparison pg's response seemed lacking good form. The first time I have ever felt so about pg's responses.

He did more than that: he brought it to the attention of their investors. The investors should feel lucky to have this conduit of information. Because if what I read in the thread is correct, they may have a problem CEO on their hands. Those guys exist- they are very smart and persuasive and can even be charming when they need to be.

But they are company killers. And if I am an investor I want to find out sooner rather than later.

This is one of those weird instances when I think the poster was right to post, and I think PG was right to kill it. The poster was looking to have a conversation about what he should do, but PG saw the inevitable flame war coming (and even beginning in the post itself). I don't think any of us would pretend that thread would end up as constructive, so PG gave the definitive answer: Talk to them.

I agree. And if the OP really just wanted honest advice on whether to sue a start up or not the OP should have omitted the name of the start up. However, the name was provided because HN was not being used to get advice but was used as a side channel to provoke action from a Y Combinator funded company.

That was not my reading. To me the post seemed to be well intended: a way to get the message through to the investors so that the problem could be resolved without legal unpleasantness. EDIT: That is still well within request for "honest advice" in my books, or at least I dont see whats dishonest about the advice sought.

"a way to get the message through to the investors so that the problem could be resolved without legal unpleasantness."

So, not looking for honest advice but using HN as a side channel.

UPDATE: I never said it wasn't well intended. I said it wasn't for honest advice, OP was using HN as a communication forum side channel.

UPDATE 2: If he wanted honest advice he'd have been wise to omit the start up name.

UPDATE 3: The primary purpose of OPs post was to use HN as a communication vehicle with the start up involved, not to seek advice.

UPDATE 4: If the OP was seeking honest advice then he wouldn't have posted the name of the start up. Posting the name of the start up which happens to be funded by the provider of the discussion medium you are using is going to result in BIASED advice.

>so PG gave the definitive answer: Talk to them.

Which the poster has been doing, and it hasn't worked?

I believe the implied advice behind that was "and if need be, have a judge and a bunch of lawyers present when you talk to them".

To slightly nuance that, given the fact that he had already tried "talking to them" (to death actually, he's bent over graciously--first via support, escalating to discussions with the CEO and ultimately an unanswered demand letter)... in this case continuing to "talk to them" means "sue them", right?

I mean, that was his question. All he seems to have left is suing. He was asking if he had another option. And, of course the other option is "raise a stink on HN/interwebs". But that's a luxury reserved for "hackers"/VIPs, not lowly customers.

PG told him to sue DrChrono.

The unfortunate reality of many YC companies is that talking to them doesn't solve the issue until it becomes a PR crisis. At that point, the company usually falls all over itself to handle the customer's needs and loudly proclaims that it really wasn't their fault that a customer's complaints somehow went un-addressed for months despite multiple appeals by the customer to multiple employees and executives.

That's something that could be reasonably expected from a mega-corporation which has to deal with multiple layers of bureaucracy, but even in those situations a direct appeal to an executive officer usually gets the issue resolved. Getting the runaround is not something anyone should have to deal with when the company has a handful of employees and minimal, if any, layers of middle management. After all, isn't one of the primary benefits of being a startup supposed to be that the company is more responsive to customer needs?

A lack of customer support is typical these days. The problem is that outsourcing to India doesn't work out and US work is too expensive.

I don't think size matters so much as company priorities. Amazon has bent over backwards for me many times. Whether at scale or not, good support takes very specific focus.

For some reason my experience with Amazon customer service has been subpar at best. On the other hand Zappos (which Amazon.com ) has had exemplary service every time I have had to deal with it.

Unfortunately, the poster already talked to them. This wasn't a question of how to proceed legally, nor was it a complaint about the company. It was an appeal to the startup community about the morals of suing, potentially successfully, a young startup.

I feel PG is wrong to kill the Doctor's valid question.

It's obvious that HN is not a news site, but a discussion forum based upon censored news. If this complaint had been about a non-YC funded company, the moderators would have left the story up. Heck, every other story on HN is usually about somebody complaining about a company's product or conduct.

Why is YC afraid of open discussion? So what if one company out of the portfolio is having problems? Nobody expects the investments to be perfect, yet killing the conversation makes it look far worse, as though there is something to hide.

End of the day, profit trumps transparency. Remember that the next time people get on the soap box and talk about internet freedom blah blah blah.

I'm going to guess the moderators don't vet every story. They just run a search for YC companies.

If Dr Bedi were to write an article titled "My experience with DrChrono" on, say, Medium and posted it here. Would it be killed as well?

Probably not. Similar stories have run on HN, sometimes at the top of the front page, before. It seems like direct appeals to HN about YC companies are the thing 'pg has a problem with.

It should be noted that Medium article rarely make the front page nowadays due to penalties, so a personal blog post might work better.

> It should be noted that Medium article rarely make the front page nowadays due to penalties, so a personal blog post might work better.

Meta question....What are these penalties you are referring to?

My understanding was the only ban hacker news imposed on sites was a binary one. ie a domain was banned or treated as an equal to all other allowed domains.

I understand there are weighting penalties, where points for certain domains only count as e.g. 40% of their real value.

Penalities mean that the link requires significantly more upvotes than usual to hit the front page, and if it does hit the front page, it won't stay there for long.

A good description of the math behind penalties (and a list of some penalized domains) is here: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

A few months ago, I read a blog post by Ken Sherrif [0] which explains (and shows graphs) that some submissions have their scores automatically penalized based on domain:

> Some submissions get automatically penalized based on the title, and others get penalized based on the domain. It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4. I looked for other words causing automatic penalties, such as awesome, bitcoin, and bubble but they do not seem to get penalized.

> I observed that many websites appear to automatically get a penalty of .25 to .8: arstechnica.com, businessinsider.com, easypost.com, github.com, imgur.com, medium.com, quora.com, qz.com, reddit.com, rt.com, stackexchange.com, theguardian.com, theregister.com, theverge.com, torrentfreak.com, youtube.com. I'm sure the actual list is longer. (This is separate from "banned" sites, which were listed at one point.

Page ranking also decays with time, and I think also once you reach a discussion threshold. (I haven't re-read the entire article as thoroughly just now.) I highly recommend reading the article, as it's VERY interesting and well presented.

[0] http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

I'm sure Dr. Bedi got his point across though. I wouldn't be surprised if everyone at the mentioned company is dealing with this s*storm right about now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

What PG is saying is that HN can be used to criticize anyone except companies backed by YC. That's unacceptable.

In a social context, you make a very strong point.

Brace for business-based rationalizations as on why it's perfectly fine (HN is a YC marketing arm, he runs the website and can do whatever he wants, etc, etc).

If you're lucky, someone will start throwing around the word "entitled" to make you look like the bad guy just for expecting any standard of behavior from another that isn't exclusively profit focused.

> (HN is a YC marketing arm, he runs the website and can do whatever he wants, etc, etc).

HN is much more than a marketing arm — it's one of the most central forums for programmer discussions today. And this makes it YC's responsibility to treat it as such.

Not to nitpick (I agree with you), but according to PG:

HN is a news site, not a forum...

I personally really just see it as a Forum about news that is primarily inhabited by a specific portion of the Tech Industry.

Is it really? Can't say I'd do differently. I'd bet the company will be reached by PG about it, despite the thread closing, because it was a near PR hit. If we're interested in a constructive process, then it would have only hurt them to make it a public ordeal.

EDIT: not allowed to reply to jacquesm, so putting it here:

Good points. I just don't think the community is that threatened by PG's moderation in this case. I know it looks bad, but sometimes the Internet can be a bit reactionary, so I can see why he tried to protect his company from a firestorm (like this) when it may not be substantiated.

As for the favoritism, well, it's YC's forum. It's mild enough that it doesn't really worry me.

Imo closing threads like that is a bigger PR hit, it makes both the start-up and HN (and by implication YC) look like they are ignoring feedback if it is public and negative. In a tech world where the norm seems to be that support is a luxury making some noise is sometimes the only way to get action (see countless threads regarding google on HN that did not get axed, implying a double standard) and in a conflict-of-interest situation letting these threads run their natural course would be to everybody's best interest.

Think of them as an opportunity to show that you do care about your customer, and that 'make something people want' is not just a hollow phrase, rather than to muzzle them and potentially adding insult to injury. If we're to believe what the OP wrote then PG's advice was especially bad given that he - by his own words, which I can't check but let's give the man the benefit of the doubt - had been trying to talk to the company for quite a while and turned to HN as a last-resort before suing them.

I agree. My trust in HN as a tech news source is shaken by this selective censorship.

Of course, this isn't my sandbox and I don't make the rules. Etc.

Thank you for clearing that to me :)

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