I hadn't seen this until 30 seconds ago. The assumption of moderator omniscience leads to a lot of mistaken conclusions!
Sure, we marked the offtopic comments offtopic, which lowers them on the page. This is standard HN moderation. If we didn't do this, then nearly every thread would be choked with something offtopic at the top.
At the same time, we haven't killed the posts or put them in a "stub for offtopicness" [1] like we otherwise would. They're still here for people who want to read them, while at the same time the main discussion can be about the main topic, which is the startup launch.
HN is actively moderated and always has been. Downweighting offtopic/generic comments is one of the biggest things we've ever discovered for improving the quality of the threads. For us it's about the quality of the site as a whole, not specific narratives, but of course everyone can (and will) make up their own mind about this. What I can tell you is (a) the way we do these things has been stable for a long time (HN time is measured in decades, not years), and (b) we're always willing to answer questions about it.
Oh, and (3) - when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story, then we moderate less than we otherwise would [2]. We do still moderate, though—we just do it less.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
But if I may ask, doesn't the policy of moderate less not more your (3) point opposite to what you said about offtopic from how I perceive it?
> Sure, we marked the offtopic comments offtopic, which lowers them on the page. This is standard HN moderation. If we didn't do this, then nearly every thread would be choked with something offtopic at the top.
>Oh, and (3) - when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story, then we moderate less than we otherwise would [2]. We do still moderate, though—we just do it less.
I would suggest that the minor disagreements that we have is because these two points seem contradictory to me from how I perceive it. I would suggest (if possible) to moderate less as you mention not more and let the order of ranking be natural which in this case might be that john's comments can come at the first place for example. Because you are moderating it by putting it into downweighting it and that's one of the concerns that we sort of have.
Thoughts?
especially when that company wants you to curl | bash their code onto your machine -- potential users deserve to know that despite being a YC-backed company (which would typically be a positive indicator, people may reduce their scrutiny) that they have been caught scraping data they shouldnt be, and then using that data for marketing, and refuse to respond to anyone who bring it up.
but it is your world and i am just living in it, so i will carry on. i appreciate that you did not collapse them.