> There's a practical difference between optimizing for content quality with honest and well-known criteria. And, optimization to prevent people to subject the party-line to criticism.
Well, yes. I really appreciate what dang & the rest of the moderators do in order to remove spam & optimise for quality — yet at the same time I really dislike a large number of the instances I've seen where they've exercised control to protect the party line from criticism (e.g. detaching subthreads or posting 'please don't argue X; we don't accept that here'). My perception (which of course is subjective, subject to confirmation bias & could be wrong) is that the vast majority of those instances I've seen have been egregiously wrong.
I've noticed fewer instances recently, perhaps because the moderators have been silently moderating or perhaps because they've actually refrained from exercising so heavy a hand.
Like I said, I approve of the good they do with respect to quality, but I actively disapprove of the censorship they have committed. Instances of the former greatly outweigh instances of the latter, but one instance of censorship is too many (it is, of course, Y Combinator's site to do with as they will).