[dredmorbius]

I really don't think that's the case. I've had enough exchanges with dang and observed enough of his moderation (visible to anyone by looking at his comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang>) that the notion that HN's moderators apply undue favouritism to HN companies seems ... unlikely. There are notable cases in which the bloom is well off the rose --- Reddit, Qurora, and Uber, notably --- that your argument has little support.

Instead I think that this really is a case of well-intentioned moderation rules, generally quite reasonably applied, having pernicious exceptions and edge cases. I suspect dang himself would tend to agree that tone and topics tend to have a status quo advantage, as I'd noted above. He and I have had this disagreement a few times, and the ultimate mission of supporting intellectual substance (as 93po noted above) is almost always the standard that he defends.

Though interestingly the top result by popularity searching "by:dang intellectual" shows a vehement defence of a progressive viewpoint against an oppressive one:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7978950>

Again: I think this is an instance of disagreement, not a pronounced or intentional site moderation bias. Mostly I'm in awe of dang's patience, consistency, and level-headedness in moderation. It's a tough job.

And sometimes, or probably often, the role of fighting an inequitable or ineffective status quo involves a lot of repetitive messaging.

[trasz]

I don’t mean favoritism towards specific companies; I mean suppressing opinions that are inconvenient to companies. For example, blatant anti-Chinese xenophobia or hate speech towards economically disadvantaged seem to be welcome here, but just try to link something to Christian fundamentalism, or try to point out the kinds of hate speech that is still tolerated by American mainstream.

[dang]

I've just banned you because you're not only ignoring our many warnings to stop breaking the site guidelines, you've crossed into outright trolling with it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33265508).

I want to add something here though. I've poured countless hours of effort over many years into telling people that they can't post that way about China—I even made a partial list at one point: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. So you could not have picked a worse example. I routinely get accused of being a secret communist agent or (as if it were a bad thing) Chinese myself, just for trying to apply HN's rules evenhandedly. (Everyone accuses the mods of being secretly on their enemies' side. You're doing the same thing here.)

Not that China is a special case; we're against all xenophobia and nationalistic flamewar, including the flavors you yourself have posted. Same goes for religious flamewar, which you've also posted a lot of. The idea that HN moderation favors Christian fundamentalism is just silly—it's an inversion of your own feelings*. The only thing we favor about religion is avoiding tedious internet mudslinging about it. That applies equally to any religion (or irreligion).

Plenty of bad posts do escape moderation, but that's because we only see a small portion of what gets posted. There's far too much for us to read it all, and we rely heavily on users to tell us about the worst bits so we can moderate them.

* People routinely imagine that the moderators are secretly in favor of whatever they themselves dislike. This is a cognitive bias, and there are always enough data points floating around to "prove" it.

p.s. as for "opinions that are inconvenient to companies"... that's pretty much what HN threads consist of.