[thrwn_frthr_awy]

My comment was more about what are all the different ways post can be ranked higher/lower. I trust Dan that the two things I mentioned they don’t do, but is there anything else like keywords/hosts that if yc members knew would give them an edge.

[tptacek]

There is no reason to believe anything like that is happening. We do well enough on HN that Dan called us out downthread, and certainly there are no secret tricks we're using --- short of "not having our friends vote us up when stuff of ours gets submitted". I think this is pretty much just conspiracy theories.

The discussion here is pretty unproductive. You're free to simply disbelieve Dan; that's a coherent perspective to have, even if I think it's deeply wrongheaded. But I assume we both know enough about the dynamics of message board "debate" to know that there's an unbounded set of un-falsifiable arguments you can throw up to support the idea that Stripe is unfairly gaming HN. Maybe they've found a wrinkle in the way the second-chance pool is handled!

[thrwn_frthr_awy]

You are quite defensive and I’ve never said I didn’t trust Dan but you keep saying it.

Because you knew enough about HN that this conversation is “unproductive” doesn’t mean it is unproductive to others. My comment got a lot of upvotes. Maybe that means the knowledge you have isn’t as wide spread as you think it is.

Also I recommend you compare Dan’s responses in this thread to your own. A very different tone—one that is “more productive” than how you’ve chosen to respond.

My entire point was more information could a. Prevent these posts in the future and b. Help to others understand the dynamics when a post like this is made. What is wrong with this? Jeez... was my initial comment that offensive to you?