Let me save you the time and (having watched and read quite a bit of Maciej's stuff, internalizing his reasoning about many things in our culture) tell you that he was being deliberately facetious here. (Maybe "facetious" is too strong a word: he was merely speaking in jest, "calling YCF out", perhaps being a bit too flippant due to his (justified) frustration, if any). I'm replying to your comment because I see you reproducing your above point all over the place, and it's sad you think that way about this.

(That being said, for someone not familiar with Maciej's approach to things, I can perhaps understand why you'd think that way.)

God forbid that someone so known for his sobriety in all things should on this one occasion have a jokey response.

If he reiterated that jokey response in his "good-faith conversation" with kevin, then kevin made the right call. I'll agree with tptacek though that they should've just said that, instead of talking about voting rings.

Different people. Dan runs HN, and I'm sure he thinks about voting rings all day long. Kevin is from YC, and thinks about founders and fitting into the YC community. I think it's safe to say that they both had very good, but entirely independent, reasons for not wanting to fund pinboard.