[youlyingsack]

> There could be a ton of reasons why your friend's Show HN got demoted, ranging from setting off the flamewar detector, the voting ring detector, getting flagged by users for some reason, getting downweighted because it broke the Show HN guidelines, getting downweighted because it broke the HN guidelines, various kinds of spam or abuse behavior (the worst of which is buying upvotes from spammers, which people unfortunately do but which typically causes their post to get buried immediately, and their account and site banned on HN).

"We have half a dozen opaque excuses" isn't the argument you think it is. The fact is this site shouldn't even exist due to the crystal clear conflict of interest between running a vc firm and a startup "news" site. That's not just journalism 101, it's common sense 101. It's not defensible.

> Not only do we not lie to the community, we try never to do anything that isn't clearly defensible to the community.

If you take one step outside the HN/YC echo chamber, you'll find that most people know that this site is a scam and heavily weighted toward promoting YC companies as that's the only reason it exists. Only a very, very foolish person would believe otherwise.

Also LOL that you hid this reply! It's because there is no defense for a vc firm pretending to run a "news" service and you know it.

[dang]

I didn't hide any of your posts - I've been unhiding them*. They are getting filtered by software. I've also been turning off the user flags that you've been attracting.

This has become repetitive, though, so I'm going to stop doing that now unless you have some specific information to offer.

* because we moderate HN less, not more, on YC-related topics [1]. Less doesn't mean zero, though.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...