alt Hacker NewsYes, 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.