[jermaustin1]

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.

[Solvency]

I am not the original poster, so what's your explanation for why his two attempts were both deleted?

[pvg]

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 [e-mail], that's in all the site docs.

[aprilnya]

A spam detector that just kills anything from people new to the site, + it not ever being reviewed/revived, is pretty uncool IMO.

[pvg]

That would be a bad spam detector but it's obviously not one HN uses, not sure how you reached that conclusion.

[aprilnya]

That’s what I inferred from your comment

[pvg]

Nothing like your inference was in my comment, beside the seemingly obvious fact nobody would use such a 'spam detector'. But either way, you can trivially verify this yourself just by looking at /newest.

[jermaustin1]

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.

[seti0Cha]

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!

[pvg]

It's my account, not Paul Graham's.

[striking]

If I had to guess, their username contains "idiot" and so might have tripped up the spam detector.

But you can always email the mods. They're very responsive.

[santoshalper]

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".