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Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

There are precedents of HN doing funny things. E.g. they mess with rankings of comments. They'll often rank a pro-YC comment to the top of the comment thread (it's clear here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354815 - that a comment made after some 30 days of the submission is sent straight to the top). There have been precedents in which comment threads critical of Dropbox and Stripe were messed with. After a lot of these occurrences, they did something really smart: they instituted a policy change on HN that "HN is not a support service for YC companies" -- that if anyone has complaints, they should take it to YC companies themselves. Now, whether that is really a good-faith policy change or a clever ploy to cut down anti-YC talk, I'll leave that up to you.

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Re 7354815, what we did was reopen the thread past the editing window so a concerned user could post relevant new information—that a controversy involving his company had been settled. That was only fair, and we'd do the same for anyone. I've done similar things a couple times for other HN users who wrote in to ask, and will continue to, because I'd feel bad not to. It has nothing to do with YC.

That was a unique case in my memory. "Often rank a pro-YC comment to the top of a thread" is pure fabrication. As I've explained many times, we intervene less, not more, when stories are anti-YC, precisely because of the conflict of interest. It's literally the first thing PG emphasized to me when explaining how to moderate HN.

A recent example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622711. That class of outrage thread is something we routinely penalize, but we penalized this one less because it was about Airbnb. There's no way it would have stayed on the front page for hours otherwise.

> As I've explained many times, we intervene less, not more, when stories are anti-YC, precisely because of the conflict of interest.

I think strictly speaking that may be true, however I suspect the reason that that is is because of the precautions already taken by the HN software and HN operators, e.g. by rankbanning. When users who have voiced anti-YC sentiments are already rankbanned, for example, you don't even need to intervene, because those comments will already have sunk to the bottom. So I think you can probably successfully refute my individual points but the larger spirit of my assertion remains.

We don't penalize accounts for making anti-YC comments.

that a comment made after some 30 days of the submission is sent straight to the top

Newer comments are given a boost in rankings so they have a chance to get upvoted. That comment might have been upvoted enough to stay on the top afterward (I am not affiliated with YC or HN).

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