The site is literally called Hacker News. The conflict of interest of a venture capital firm running a "news" site is not even a grey area of ethical violations. It's clearly problematic, and your refusal to even acknowledge it is a great example of how the contents of this site are highly untrustworthy.
You're misinterpreting the word "news" in the name to mean the same thing as journalism / news reporting, which HN plainly is not. It's a place where readers post and discuss links they find interesting. Sometimes those are articles from news publications, sometimes they're blog posts, sometimes they're a lot of things. HN is a conversation place—an online watercooler, basically. That's not a journalistic operation. If anything it's more of an entertainment site.
There's certainly a conversation to be had about how we manage YC's interests vis-à-vis community interests—I've discussed that with many users over the years [1, 2], the principles have been well-established for a long time, and I'm always happy to explain more. But not on the basis of a giant non sequitur!
> You're misinterpreting the word "news" in the name to mean the same thing as journalism / news reporting
That's laughable, you don't get to redefine "news". It's right there in the name. If this place was honest, it would be called yc-announcements.com or something with transparency as to the goals of the site's owners.
You're really trying to dodge this, but again, it's cut and dry. Here I'll help you and any reader that actually want to learn about the media's responsibility to not hold conflicts of interest:
I guess we disagree about whether words sometimes mean different things in different contexts? The real judge here is the community. I doubt you'll get very far making your (rather extreme) argument to them.
As for dodging, I've repeatedly unkilled your comments (which have been getting killed by one of HN's software filters) and replied. With dodges like that, who needs engagement? It has become repetitive, though, so if you'd like to continue the conversation, it would be good to say something new.
> The real judge here is the community. I doubt you'll get very far making your (rather extreme) argument to them.
I stopped posting here because, dang, your moderation and preference for YC-positive narrative and companies was I thought excessive, especially compared to moderation on even Reddit. Your thread here with this poster, to be honest, belies to HN guidelines to "not feed the trolls." I have never seen a successful moderator troll other users so intensely. Please take a step back from the keyboard and think about why you feel the need to respond here, to "correct the record", to post "related threads" at the top of so many posts, etc etc. Whatever feedback you're getting today is clearly an echo chamber of YC energy. I won't even talk to YC start-ups now because of the bias you have personally shown.
You've repeatedly expressed that you don't like how we moderate HN and consider it inferior to your own practices as a moderator elsewhere. I'm sorry to hear that (and you may be right about the latter!), but your posts about these things have included several false statements as well as things that the bulk of the community just doesn't agree with you about. For example, when I post about related threads, that has nothing do with YC. I do it because readers like looking at links to past threads. It seems a strange thing to complain about.
What's wrong with engaging with someone who has concerns how the site is run?
And I have never really seen any indication of excessive "moderation and preference for YC-positive narrative". It should be unsurprising that his personal views are positive towards YC, but I see no problem with that as I have seen many people freely criticize YC, Paul Graham, and dang without being moderated away or kicked off the site (indeed, that is happening right here and now!)
Dang didn't engage with my argument at all. He threw up a smoke screen and claimed they're not journalists (they just happen to have called the site Hacker News, but it's not really news I guess?). The parent is correct, dang is not acting as a moderator, but as a pro-YC participant in many threads. That along with the lack of transparency, "launch hn", yc hiring threads with no comments, opaque moderation (no mod log)... are all exactly what you'd expect from a site run by a venture capital firm.
If YC was going to take on the herculean task of trying to prove that their venture capital run message board was somehow not biased, they would need to really lean into transparency. As it is, they've done the exact opposite. I strongly disagree with dang that the general sentiment is that HN is unbiased, maybe amongst the faithful here people will say that (hoping someday to get some YC cash), but in the wider industry no one thinks HN is anything but YC's media outlet and the policies, features and moderator actions here back that up.
The onus is on the platform to prove that their conflict of interest isn't effecting the contents of the site, not on the audience to take their word on faith.
