That's not what happened. Certain users have additional moderation power to downweighted generic/offtopic comments. I encourage you to read the answer dang posted in his linked thread. The linked post is also not the one that got downweighted.

Just to be clear: I don't think there is anything outrageous about such a system. It's probably positive for the community.

what happened is i pissed some people off and they manipulated the comment section so it ended up looking like the product is well-received by the community

my comment was on-topic and had valid points contributing to the discussion

the generic/offtopic is just a cover up

in fact why don't we just downrank your comment right here and mark it as generic or maybe off-topic? /s

That's not what happened. I've explained in detail what did happen, many times, so this doesn't seem to be about facts.

We cut users a lot more slack when they're making shit up about HN, YC, YC startups, and so on, but the amount of slack we cut is nonetheless finite and it's time you stopped.

Lest we hear more about how you're being repressed: people criticize HN, YC, and YC startups all the time here with zero problems. You, however, have derailed more than one discussion now by inundating it with dozens of sensational, false, and/or offtopic comments. That is not what HN threads are for, and even though we moderate HN less when YC startups are the topic, we eventually have to draw a line.

Actually I have the impression that you're rather a good commenter in general and this isn't personal in any way, so if you want to fix this, it won't be hard.

Go back and read the thread friend. It’s not normal downvotes. Some users have the ability to down weight a comment. When that happens on a YC product thread and the comment was critical, anyone would be slightly suspicious. The reason was that the comment was off topic, but I disagree.

> Being flagged / downvoted by users isn't "manipulated"

Did you even read the comment?

> even-though it had the first spot with 30 upvotes

The comment had upvotes and a mod confirmed that the ranking was later manipulated, meaning it didn't lose ranking because of down votes.

My lord, it's one think when people just read article titles and skip the actual article, but it's incredibly immature and perplexing when people just read the first line of a comment!

Please don't jump to criticism and read the things properly, if not, try to refrain from commenting .

no, no, no

you're missing the point!

the comment wasn't flagged and it wasn't downvoted

in fact the opposite is true as it has 30 upvotes, upvoted by regular users like you

the comment was downranked, so it only appears lower on the page

this feature isn't available for regular users, only for an elite group

> you're missing the point!

No, the point is that it was downvoted / downranked / flagged because it was a low quality comment that is spreading FUD and it doesn't matter who did it.

if my comment was so low quality, why did 30 users choose to upvote it?

why isn't HN respecting user's opinions and manipulating the positions as they wish?

You seem to be under a mistaken impression of how HN works. Upvotes are an important signal but far from the only one. If HN were to go by upvotes alone, it would consist of little more than sensational flamewars about the same few hot topics over and over again (plus tons of meta drama). This is a weakness of the upvoting system. Lots of past explanation about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

Since HN's mandate is not to be that, we have to have countervailing mechanisms to compensate for that weakness. Otherwise the system would get stuck in one of its failure modes. The countervailing mechanisms include things like flags, software mechanisms (including automated up- and down-weights) and moderation (including manual downweights and other interventions). All this is happening all the time. If it weren't, HN would be a completely different place.

None of this is secret; it's not all transparent in the sense that we don't publish a full log of all the factors, but we're happy to answer specific questions.

At least in theory, you can get people worked up with inflammatory, wrong, inciteful, off-topic, meta, or similar content. I don’t know if your comment(s) fit into those kinds of categories, but as a user I’m fine with those sorts of things being downranked/flagged so more interesting things can rise to the top. I think they do a pretty good job generally with moderation, though I’m sure mistakes are sometimes made and maybe your situation was one.

i'm fine with being downvoted and i'd be happy if this would've been the case here

but what happened though is that it wasn't legitimately downvoted, it was moved down the page

check my history, i didn't get 5000 points for posting "inflammatory, wrong, inciteful, off-topic, meta, or similar content" did i?

What I mean is that you can get people to upvote those kinds of things, so pointing to them as having been upvoted isn’t on its own proof that it isn’t inflammatory, meta, off-topic, etc.

I checked the post in question at your request, and to be honest they way I read it is a bit off topic picking fights or meta discussion around the politics of HN. I read it as a bit inflammatory as well. Some of your responses here seem kind of similar, maybe you’re experiencing it differently but it seems like you are angrily responding to almost every branch of the threads here. But that’s all just my personal opinion of what I’m seeing.

> why isn't HN respecting user's opinions and manipulating the positions as they wish?

Because certain comments can be quite agreeable, but don't encourage interesting discussions. Your particular thread had more discussion about bitterness and etiquette than content. Even though your points are valid that's not the kind of discussion one wants to have at the top of any article.

Derailing the comment section about this article with your own agenda isn't particularly helpful either. But at least I appreciate that I now know about that feature.