I'm a nobody in every sense of the word. I didn't go to a fancy school; I didn't join a startup or a unicorn; I've worked as a corporate web dev for 20 years using ASP.Net and C#; I know very few people in tech (and no one high up).
My posts are never "shadow deleted" they in fact sometimes get a boost from the mods when they though it just missed the mark timing-wise (i.e. interesting post, but some breaking news thing happened, and I didn't get the love).
The moderators only car about keeping the discord civil (as civil as possible), and the posts relevant/interesting for their niche.
There probably is a "club" - but not being in it doesn't get your content shadow deleted. It just wasn't interesting enough at the time to get votes.
They weren't deleted, the account was brand new when they were posted so they were probably killed by the spam detector. Questions about stuff like that should just be sent to hn@ycombinator.com, that's in all the site docs.
They are speculating, but there is no telling if it ever even happened. I tend to believe the site's news was just more interesting than what OOP posted.
That's Paul Graham's account, so maybe not just speculation. I didn't realize he still read this site. Not to jump on to OPs paranoia but I kind of thought he was frequenting some secret meta-HN site that still talks about entrepreneurship. Paul, if you see this, let me in! I swear I won't complain about capitalism!
Who knows - maybe different mods have different criteria/bias? Maybe today is a slow day?
I mean, this post isn't really big news, it feels like it's just barely scraping by the notability/interest level required to make it on HN. Mostly, I just think the presence of some kind of cabal or conspiracy is a lot less likely than "mods are human and thus subjective and inconsistent".
My posts are never "shadow deleted" they in fact sometimes get a boost from the mods when they though it just missed the mark timing-wise (i.e. interesting post, but some breaking news thing happened, and I didn't get the love).
The moderators only car about keeping the discord civil (as civil as possible), and the posts relevant/interesting for their niche.
There probably is a "club" - but not being in it doesn't get your content shadow deleted. It just wasn't interesting enough at the time to get votes.