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Why is YC is trying to hide their own post?

23 points by Lionga ↗ HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35114009 is on page 2 even if it it has super many points for the short time it lived (was on rank 1 until it go nuked). Also the title was changed, but that I could live with.

Goodbye this place has been corrupted

26 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 71.9 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
It might not be dang's fault.

Many users have the ability to flag, it takes more than one flag to flag a post but not much more than one flag.

Back in 2010 the HN community leaned libertopian but it has a large Jacobin contingent and that post could have gotten a few flags from people who think it is self-serving claptrap.

MatthiasPortzel
It got flagged pretty quickly after the title was updated to "Urgent: Sign the petition now." I think people were happy to upvote it when it had the (IMO) more fair title "YC is asking for a bailout."
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version_five
I posted the story (was definitely not expecting it to get so much attention) - I know that stories get downranked when they have way more comments than points, as this one did, and they get buried if they are flagged (though it's hard to reconcile the CEO of YC posting repeatedly in a flagged thread). So I think it's probably completely automatic that it got hidden as it did. Somebody would have had to intentionally do the name change though.
[dead] nightmarish
[flagged]
mtmail
You posted 13 comments there and most got flagged. Most were simply low quality, trashing, name calling, lol, shouting (uppercase wording) and hardly added value to the discussion. Don't take it too personal but that leads to a low quality discussion overall.
anigbrowl
You are being unnecessarily rude, but I am entertained. If this cash flow situation is still an issue on Monday I would appreciate a non-snarky serious analysis given the policy insider position you say you have. Amid the cutting remarks you have made some good points and I'd like to hear more of that but in an educational way.

Not trying to be condescending, I don't have any significant financial assets myself. I'm just interested in train wrecks and want to understand them better. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't experiencing high levels of schadenfreude though.

MatthiasPortzel
I flagged this post, since meta-discussion of HN moderation decisions are pretty much never constructive. I imagine Dang and Garry do want it on the front page, and will figure out how to restore it while keep discussion under control.
gus_massa
99.99% sure it was flagged by users. It was for a short time [flagged] [dead] that is what appears when enough users flag it and it get killed by the software. Now it's only [flagged]. Perhaps some users vouched it or perhaps he mods unkilled it.

Anyway, the discussion looks nasty.

[Edit: look note at the bottom] The original title was "Urgent: Sign the petition now: Thousands of startups and hundreds of thousands", now is "Urgent: Sign the petition now". I dislike the original and the new title. I'd prefer "Petition: Thousands of startups and hundreds of thousands of startup jobs are at risk" that is better with the dry stile here.

> Goodbye this place has been corrupted

It's strange because the common accusation is that the mods of HN highlight the good posts about YC and hide the post that badmouth YC. But this is the reverse case, it would be expected that they make this post sticky at the #1 of the front page instead of hiding it. My guess is that the mods are trying to have editorial independence and respect the flags of the users and don't give special preference to YC posts.

Edit: It also was posted a few minutes before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35113681 and that is still [flagged] [dead]. Perhaps this story never got [dead] and only [flagged], and the original title was "YC Is Asking for a Bailout". Anyway, this does not change my opinion on the subject.

tomato_123
> Small business depositors at Silicon Valley Bank should be made whole. Regulators need to conduct a backstop of depositors. We are not asking for a bank bailout.

Put another way: "We are asking for a VC bailout."

garry
We're asking for a backstop for deposits for small and medium sized businesses that will not survive without being able to make payroll.
muzz
If payroll is your primary concern, this seems like a roundabout way to go about it. Why not bridge them directly?
tomato_123
"Small business depositors at Silicon Valley Bank should be made whole."

Don't beat around the bush. You are asking for these depositors to be bailed out. "Depositors" is a weaselly way to say "companies that my friends and I have major equity positions in."

If these are great businesses, they'll find financing. Current equity holders will suffer a loss. That's how it's supposed to work. Eat your lumps and don't go begging for a bailout for your foolish risk taking and lack of due diligence.

Understandably you're trying to maximize the value of the equity that you and your friends own. But it's a bad look to pretend this is about workers paying their mortgages. If that's what you cared about you'd be signing a petition for mortgage forbearance or some other direct-to-worker bailout.

Stop lying. It's transparent and pathetic.

LargeTomato
However you feel about the situation you have to admit there is a massive conflict of interest here. You have a clear financial incentive to have the American people bail out the companies you invest in.
dang
As several commenters have correctly guessed, it was flagged by users and set off the flamewar detector.

An admin changed the title to the article's title, in keeping with the site guidelines. Other than that, I'm not aware of any mod actions affecting the post.

zamnos
But why not turn the Flag Shield on for that post? That's been done in the past for other contentious topics. If ever there was a time to get a return on investment for running this forum, right now would be it! Otherwise what is the point of paying the server bills and dang and co's salary? What is the ROI for running HN if not for this sort of emergency?
dang
We're extra careful about how we moderate HN when YC (or YC-funded startups) are part of the story. If we had turned user flags off on the post, some people would have felt like we were using moderation power to promote a YC story, even though HN users had expressed (through flags) that they didn't want it on the site. In such a conflict, we need to follow the community's verdict, even if it goes against YC. We do that because we understand that the good will of the HN community is more valuable in the long run. Does that make sense?
zamnos
Thank you for the response so late on a Saturday night. What you said makes sense and is entirely reasonable, but there are times to be unreasonable. SVB just failed! The community's verdict didn't need to be followed when Elon was taking over Twitter; that story that stayed up far longer than it would have naturally. Is that more important than making payroll for hundreds of small businesses? Actions speak louder than words.

Let the story live, just be transparent and pin a comment at the top saying it is staying up because it materially affects the company that runs this site. The community is able to understand. Frame it as intentionally paying for an otherwise free service because you want it to continue to exist. Make the front page 1 story longer while it's up if it's about the sanctity of the front page. This community is reminded it's an arm of YC because of how jarring it is every time there's a job posting on the front page and we can't comment on it.

You've done such a great job stewarding this community, time to cash in on the good will you've banked, for our benefactors.

Whatever you decide I'll respect your decision, but I felt another perspective might help.

dang
The SVB failure has been massively covered on HN. It's not as if this story has been neglected in the slightest!

The post we're talking about, which users flagged, was a YC blog post asking people to sign a petition. Petitions aren't particularly on topic for HN to begin with. We occasionally override the community verdict if we feel like a story is particularly interesting and the override is a 'teachable moment' about the kind of culture we want on HN. That wasn't the case here, and if we had tried to override the community to favor a YC company post on a hot and controversial topic that many people were angry about, we would have been skinned alive.

Two moderation skills that help a lot are (1) not overusing power, and (2) not stepping in front of fast-moving trains. One learns these things the hard way and I don't want to revisit the lesson!