https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] and if you worry that we may secretly be communist agents please see this mini-FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652363 and the associated "algorithm": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
The only one that is starting the flamewar is you.
Moreover they need to do it in a way that avoids generic tangents, and the GP was a classic generic tangent, sucking the thread into the nearest black hole:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
As it turns out, you're wrong on the facts as well. YC got out of China years ago. But none of that ever had anything whatsoever to do with how we moderate HN. It's much more straightforward: we don't want predictable, tedious, nasty flamewars on HN, we want the opposite.
That's literally all there is to this, even though I routinely get accused of being a secret agent, stealth activist, or some other sinister entity just for doing this silly job. The only non-obvious mechanism at work here, indeed the sole aspect that isn't brain-dead in its obviousness, is continually trying to figure out new ways to explain this to the community.
All in all I really meant that I appreciate the work that you do. You do an excellent job in maintaining HN as my favourite forum on the internet. I understand this is probably wearing you thin so I'm going to leave it now but I hope you can understand why I felt it necessary to clarify the above.
It’s come to the point where we need to have a constant and sustain vocalisation against the CCP and the dystopian future they are building. They represent an existential threat to anything that isn’t the CCP and they’ve been very successful in getting their hooks into western society and the world at large. You see it on Reddit all the time. Moderators remove comments because it doesn’t follow some sort of vague guideline, about facts for example, when really it is removed because it is critical of the CCP. The cleverness of this is that it’s hard to prove. While I don’t believe there is direct censorship here on hackernews the above comment and reasoning by dang can be interpreted in the same way. None of the reasons dang gave were present in the comment that was replied to. CCP censorship is here now in western society directly and indirectly through self censorship to protect investments. Our short termism makes us very vulnerable to their bs.
I don't disagree with your comment however none of the rules dang mentioned were actually broken. I read through the link and it only raised more questions. As I see it either the rules need to be updated or an official announcement from YC stating their position on this ever returning topic will put this to bed.
In the end, remember that politics is preference, and that whoever is in power gets to assert their preferences more.