It's very important to understand that this story was at #1 all day yesterday, in contradiction to HN's normal rules. That is, we bent over backwards to allow this story to have much more attention on HN than it would have gotten in a normal case. That's why it got 4000 upvotes and 1300+ comments and was the #1 story the entire day (https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2021-06-07).
Less moderation does not mean no moderation, however. It does not serve the community, or the quality of HN, to repeat the same thing all over again the next day. Downweighting follow-ups in order to avoid repetition, is another bedrock principle of HN moderation; otherwise the front page would be dominated by the same few stories every day. There are lots of past explanations about that at these links:
It's very important to understand that this story was at #1 all day yesterday, in contradiction to HN's normal rules. That is, we bent over backwards to allow this story to have much more attention on HN than it would have gotten in a normal case. That's why it got 4000 upvotes and 1300+ comments and was the #1 story the entire day (https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2021-06-07).
Why did we do that? Because we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That is literally the first principle of HN moderation, and we stick to it strictly.
Less moderation does not mean no moderation, however. It does not serve the community, or the quality of HN, to repeat the same thing all over again the next day. Downweighting follow-ups in order to avoid repetition, is another bedrock principle of HN moderation; otherwise the front page would be dominated by the same few stories every day. There are lots of past explanations about that at these links:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...