I've seen the mods take a pretty hands-off stance when YC (or its companies) are being criticized. I think it's a stated policy and I've generally felt they live by it. (If they didn't, I suppose I couldn't necessarily tell for sure, but based on what I see them "let stand", I think they do.) They're human and imperfect, but they don't seem to do much "home cooking" from what I can tell.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27438258

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400556

If I get banned/downvoted for this, so be it. But I cannot image a more naive or less aware position.

This site is incredibly censored. Their mod system is very gamed with people who know how to build up credit and downvote en masse.

Whether or not the founders support this behavior, it exists. There is a nasty, nasty f-in power culture that censors people along a political power axis these days. You cannot understand YC/HN without understanding this puritanical (left-wing) culture that has burrowed its way into VC backed companies.

And yet here is your comment for all the world to see.

And here is my comment, downvoted to 0 and hidden to grey, and people who dislike me and go to my thread and downvote all my past posts by 1.

Ignore me, dismiss me, whatever. But the censorious culture of the Bay Area is the very opposite of the (pretty neat and good) hippy dippy free culture of the 60s. It's the reason people are leaving, because their free-wheeling ideas are encouraged elsewhere.

Myself... I'm actually going to go up-vote you, just so people can for sure absolutely see your bitter ad-hominem attack.

You clearly don't know what "left-wing" means if you think that a bunch of upper middle class highly compensated engineers are that... Actual "left-wing" comments on HN are generally downvoted quite intensely.

EDIT: I just want to add how ... odd... it is to slap a "left wing" accusation about YC-backed companies as we sit here on a thread talking about a YC-backed company that was basically a loan-shark pay-day lender. WTF? That's left-wing? Ok then.

That payday lender was founded with a left-wing banner of disrupting the status quo of lending. YC wouldn’t have funded someone if they were just like, “yeah, we want to start a payday lender.”

Yeah that for sure sounds just like seizing the means of production and workers of the world unite.

A comment that is grayed out..