[peregrine]

I get you'd like to avoid spammers, bots and etc, but its not at all fair to claim you're not playing politics.

> but that story wasn't touched by moderators.

Is uncharitable as it gets. I cannot verify it. Based on 3163 days of intuition I can see "ahh yes sometimes stories get unfairly flagged automatically" but I can I also see that 1) Its political 2) It discusses a YC company in a not so appealing light.

I'll take your word on it here that nobody touched it, but I honestly see stories disappearing every day whenever they so much as negatively glance at YC/Investments or Politics that benefit YC and YC Investments. (Many former YC companies will more than likely benefit from being able to purchase our browsing history, for example.)

[dang]

Let me try to allay your concerns. The story you linked to was penalized automatically. There's no moderator penalty on it. No moderator may even have seen it.

We don't moderate HN to protect YC startups—just the opposite. This comment summarizes the situation and has links to plenty more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861389.

It's common—standard, in fact—for politically committed HN users to believe that the site is secretly aligned against their politics. That's mostly not because it is; it's because humans typically perceive their side to be at a disadvantage. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932041, with links to plenty more.

You'll notice I said "mostly". That's because I have no way of guaranteeing that our own biases (which, being human, we have) don't affect moderation. I can't even guarantee that to myself. But we do work hard at it and have a lot of practice. If you know of any large community on the internet where that's more true than it is here, I'd like to see it.

Lack of bias is never perceived as 'lack of bias'; it's perceived as strong bias in favor of the opposing side, in proportion to the strength of one's own views. That's unfortunate for us, but it's how the human nature cookie crumbles.

Can you verify any of the above? Not fully, nor could you with more data. A quantum of trust is necessary for a community to function. If we say we didn't moderate a story and someone doesn't believe us (meaning, among other things, that they think we'd be dumb enough to lie), I doubt there's much we can do.

If you still have concerns, feel free to send them to [e-mail].

[peregrine]

Thanks for the detailed followup. I will admit that I have been less than charitable.

If this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404 had never happened I would have far fewer concerns. Since that week I've been keeping an eye on all posts that vanish from the front page or get severely punished and politics seems to get the axe more than not. Again this is N=1 and not a "study" and contains all of my biases.

Sorry for being disgruntled. I overreacted to what I perceived to be a policy that has continued for over a week.