Earlier quoted context omitted.
> anymore Not only did we never ban people for criticizing YC companies, the very first thing PG told me when I started moderating HN, and the thing that he emphasized most strongly after that, was never to do things that could be construed (or misconstrued) as censorship of anti-YC stories. (I've edited out some irritation that leaked through in my original version of this comment.)
dang, I think HN has improved for the better, especially since some effort has been made to make things more transparent. But it would be despicably dishonest for you guys to deny that routinely you guys do things here to protect YC companies (including manipulating voting points on comments/ submissions). One example (on the top of my mind) is the drchrono post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7178004 Even thou…
It isn't hard to deny that general impression you're reporting, because it isn't true. But I don't see any way to refute such a sweeping claim convincingly. As far as I can tell it exists only on the level of rumor and is unanswerable. But I'm happy to reply about specific cases.
In the Drchrono case, we got an email from the founder asking to post a response after the commenting window had closed. I agreed, but not because this was a YC startup, but rather because we would do this for any startup in this situation, and have indeed done so for at least one non-YC startup I can remember. Before I agreed to the Drchrono founder's request, I told him I needed to make sure that we would do it for any startup in that situation, and I thought long and hard before concluding that was true. It was by far the most important factor in that decision.