I believe you. At the same time, even if HN does not boost YC related threads I strongly suspect that you do occasionally penalize threads critical of YC backed companies.
We—and I personally—go out of our way not to do that. I could cite several recent examples of critical threads about YC cos that were on the front page, which we might have penalized had they been about anybody else [1]. But I'm not going to list them because that wouldn't be fair.
[1] We sometimes penalize posts castigating companies for something the poster didn't like, because the resulting threads tend to be indignation-fueled rather than substantive.
Again, I believe you, but this has happened in the past unless I'm very much mistaken.
To date I've been very much impressed with your efforts to bring transparency to the moderation. Thanks for all the hard work.
As for your caveat: that's a very fine line. And if selectively enforced it could still have the same effect. I know that YC owns HN and that's all fine and good until there is a conflict of interest. And I personally feel that HN is more important than YC (though, of course the YC founders & partners would probably disagree with that, as is their good right).
Thanks! Now how about some more highly technical jacquesm classics? :)
Not sure I'm getting you about the caveat, unless you mean that we shouldn't penalize any threads. If we didn't do that, the front page would be overrun with low-quality controversies and shouting matches: in davidw's words, "articles that get you riled up, but really don't lead to any productive or interesting discussions". [1]
So there's editorial judgment involved. There always has been. HN has always been a blend of voting and curation.
What I'm saying above is that we exercise that editorial judgment less, not more, when YC-startup-related controversies crop up—precisely because we don't want to be accused of censorship for venal purposes. Of course people accuse us of precisely that anyway, but that goes with the territory. I don't expect not to get acccused; I do want to be able to reply in good conscience.
Two more caveats for you. I'm not saying there aren't unconscious biases—that would be foolish—just that we consciously try hard to guard against them. I'm also not saying that every bad story about YC gets a free pass to the front page. The bar may be lower, but it still exists. When articles come up that are just plain terrible, we don't, in Mrs. Thatcher's immortal words, go wobbly.
The "Drop Dropbox" story you cite is an example of all this. I initially penalized it. Why? Because it's a classic specimen of the riler-uppers davidw was talking about. The penalty made it go from #1 to the lower part of the front page. However, I forgot that Dropbox was a YC company (perhaps they're so big that I don't think of them as a startup any more). When someone reminded me of that, my first thought was that we needed to lighten the penalty and I immediately went and did so. That made the post go to #9. From then on, we didn't touch it at all [2]. The reason it fell from there was because, as incredibly many votes as it got, it got even more incredibly many flags. I just wrote some code to scan the last million posts to HN and sort them by flaggedness. That post is the most flagged by far; it has 3x as many flags as the next. (In the same data set, it is the third most upvoted story and has 11% more votes than the next.)
[2] Actually, we did. A moderator fat-finger later that evening caused several things to happen, one of which was killing that story. I saw that in the logs and immediately reversed it, along with all the other effects of the fat-finger. I think the story was in that killed state for a couple hours. And now you have a complete dump of my memory about "Drop Dropbox". For the love of God or at least Mrs. Thatcher, please, no more "examples" tonight!
(Also, once Kevin's mobile-friendly markup is out, there should be no more moderator fat-fingers.)
Edit the morning after: I hasten to add that my Thatcher references were merely an attempt at a joke, not an oblique political statement.
More technical jacquesm classics take a while to produce :) But I'm sure something will pop up sooner or later, as soon as my current batch of commitments has been dealt with.
Thank you very much for the explanation, much appreciated. Interesting facts there about the flags. I've long since lost my flagging, posting and upvoting ability so none of that was mine, I merely wondered as an observer because the rankings of that page made absolutely no sense at times and I did spot it when it got deleted and then re-appeared.
Since we're speculating, it's possible that it's not YC doing that but rather the YC alumni collectively flagging negative stories. It doesn't even need to be a conspiracy since there are so many alums that they're unlikely to all hold the same views. Of course, this speculation is based on the idea that the actions of YC alums have more weighting than the rest of us.
