alt Hacker NewsI'm curious whether you're playing devil's advocate or if you genuinely believe that characterizing OP’s comment as “tin foil hat” thinking is fair.
The concentration of wealth and influence gives entities like Nvidia the structural power to pressure smaller players in the economic system. That’s not speculative -- it’s common sense, and it's supported by antitrust cases. Firms like Nvidia are incentivized to abuse their market power to protect their reputation and, ultimately, their dominance. Moreover, such entities can minimize legal and economic consequences in the rare instances that there are any.
So what exactly is the risk created by the moderation team allowing criticism of YC or YC companies? There aren’t many alternatives -- please fill me in if I'm missing something. In contrast, allowing sustained or high-profile criticism of giants like Nvidia could, even if unlikely, carry unpredictable risks.
So were you playing devil’s advocate, or do you genuinely think OP’s concern is more conspiratorial than it is a plausible worry about the chilling effect created by concentration of immense wealth?
>the concentration of wealth
On this topic, I'm curious what others think of the renaming of this post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44435732
The original title I gave was: "Paul Graham: without billionaires, there will be no startups."
As it was a tweet, I was trying to summarize his conclusive point in the first part of the sentence:
Few of them realize it, but people who say "I don’t think that we should have billionaires" are also saying "I don't think there should be startups,"
Now, this part of the sentence to me was the far more interesting part because it was a much bolder claim than the second part of the sentence:
because successful startups inevitably produce billionaires.
This second part seems like a pretty obvious observation and is a completely uninteresting observation by itself.
The claim that successful startups have produced billonaires therefore successful startups require billionaires is a far more contentious and interesting claim.
The mods removed "paul graham" from the title and switched the title to the uninteresting second part of the sentence, turning it into a completely banal and pointless title: Successful startups produce billionaires. Thereby removing any hint of the bold claim being made by the founder of one of the most succesful VCs of the 21st century. And incidentally, also the creator of this website.
I can only conclude someone is loathe to moderate a thread about whether billionaires are neccessary for sucessful startups to exist.
ps. There is no explicit guideline for tweets as far as I can tell. You are forced to use an incomplete quote or are forced to summarize the tweet im some fashion.