Yes, I just mean that the way we moderate HN (including how we handle negative YC-related stories), while it doesn't satisfy everyone, does satisfy the majority of users here. That's no accident—it's why we moderate HN this way in the first place. Keeping the community happy (er, as happy as possible under the circumstances) is the important job. Without that, HN would disintegrate.
Of course I'd rather satisfy even more users, but it's hard to figure out how to do that at scale. For one thing, i's not monotonic: making changes to satisfy class X can easily dissatisfy class Y, and then it's unclear if we're worse off or better; probably worse.
That applies in cases like the current thread, btw. I believe the majority of HN readers would find HN less satisfying if flamebait were more prominent on the site. People come here to get away from all that, to find new and (above all) interesting things they haven't seen before. Doing our best to clear away the less intellectually-curious stuff (riler-uppers, mountain-from-molehill clickbait, tawdry drama and so on) helps keep a large part, and actually the more valuable part, of the audience here. It would be foolish to trade that away in the hope of winning over the bitter contingent who, though vocal and prolific, are a tiny sliver of the community. Especially since attempting to win them over would likely be futile. I know, because I've tried—hard and for years.
The conflict-of-interest concern is a real one, of course, and the solution to that is the rule I've been explaining elsewhere in the thread (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). It does the job fine and has held up well. It doesn't satisfy everyone, but the users it doesn't are probably unsatisfiable anyhow; and it reduces the risk of alienating the ones who are here for the right reason (to read interesting things).
> Hope I don't count among those.
Don't worry, we're good! But I appreciate you adding those bits because it's not always easy to tell where people are coming from.
I should say one other thing: criticism is fine, I'm happy to do my best to answer it, and critical users have their place. Even the users (not talking about you here!) who are mad about something we did or didn't do 10 years ago and show up at every opportunity with garish accusations—even they have their place...though they're not necessarily the easiest to relate to.