[ycconflict]

> To be clear, it would be bad if HN had to split off from YC - bad for HN, bad for YC, bad for the community here.

To be clear, it would be extremely good for the community if YC and HN were not the same company. The conflict of interest is stark and a violation of every tenet of journalism. I cant tell if you're purposely lying for the sake of profit motive or just very ignorant of the history and foundation of journalism.

I've never, ever before seen someone claim that a conflict of interest was "good for the community"!

[dang]

We're not journalists, and HN isn't journalism, so this seems a bit askew.

[ycconflict]

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.

[dang]

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!

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

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

[ycconflict]

> 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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest#Media

Again, there is no excuse for this. You're arguing a point that's been well decided by people far brighter than those running this VC firm.

[dang]

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.

[choppaface]

> 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.