dang says: "The only thing we care about is not having tedious internet indignation dominating HN threads—and boy has there been a lot of that on OpenAI lately."
Also: "there are a few people who aren't mods in the sense of working for YC but whom you could call mods in the sense that they have some limited moderation abilities, one of which is to mark subthreads as offtopic or generic"