> If the algorithm "working as intended" consistently downranks stories that cast a bad light on YCombinator, the sorts of people y'all mingle with, or the tech industry in general...is that any better than putting your thumb on the scale?

That's the exact opposite of what Dan stated, what this thread (and your link) demonstrate, and my own lived experience here.

Everything you've said here is answerable by anyone who is willing to read some of the posts I just linked to. Here's the link again: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

HN is designed to downweight sensational-indignant stories, internet dramas, and riler-uppers, for the obvious reason that if we didn't, then they would dominate HN's frontpage like they dominate the rest of the internet. Anyone who spends time here (or has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) knows that this is not what the site is for. The vast majority of HN readers like HN for just this reason. It is not some arbitrary switch that we could just flip, if only we would stop being censoriously sinister It's essential to the operation of the site.

At the same time, we downweight such threads less when the sensational-indignant story, drama, or riler-upper happens to be about YC or a YC-related startup. Note that word less. It means we "put our thumb on the scale" in the opposite direction you're implying: to make those stories rank higher than they otherwise would.

How you get from that all the way back to the notion that we moderate HN specifically to suppress negative stories about YC strikes me as escape-artist-level logic, and citing a web page that we ourselves publish as the best (only?) supposed evidence for this is surely a bit ironic.

dang won't like me sharing this repo (sorry!) but hn-undocumented has a relevant section on this:

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...

> Currently, there is no evidence that non-job submissions about a YC startup receive preferential treatment on the front page, or kill submissions critical of a YC startup. In fact, the moderators have stated that they explicitly avoid killing controversial YC posts when possible.

And also:

> Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which — although not an explicit benefit — does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions.

> If the algorithm "working as intended" consistently downranks stories that cast a bad light on YCombinator

We manually intervene to reduce or remove the penalties that downrank YC-related stories. Thus, stories like this one get more front page exposure and discussion than they would if they were not YC-related. And anyone can audit this via /active, HNRankings and any other tools they may want to build by pulling data from the API.

> the sorts of people y'all mingle with, or the tech industry in general

That phrase reflects an assumption that YC is synonymous with the tech industry and that everyone at YC and in the tech industry “mingles” and agrees with one another. That’s far from true. Even among the YC partners there are differences in opinion about these things, and there have been huge public disputes in recent years between prominent YC-aligned figures and other major tech industry identities.

It’s natural that people come to HN to discuss and scrutinize the activities of the tech industry, given that we’re a major public discussion forum focused on the tech industry. We accept that and make allowances for it. It doesn’t mean we need to apply the same lower-moderation philosophy to every tech industry controversy that we do when YC is a part of the story.