I would feel similarly concerned if Twitter or Facebook moderated conversations on their partners or competitors by suggesting that some users weren't intellectually curious enough, or that they had entrenched positions, or that they were full of negativity, or that they weren't "fun" enough. In this perspective, judging a user by the aforementioned values seems to be the wrong tier of values for the stakes at play. I feel that community trust is what is at stake here.
Also, you have mentioned before how HN moderation is not secret. Is my account penalized in any way? Given that some users have been hellbanned before, I do feel uncomfortable with the degree of perceived transparency here. As a regular HN reader, it is not my expectation that users shall receive transparency when they are penalized.
One of my takeaways from this conversation with the user <ushakov> is that they were initially opaquely penalize, and that we would not have received clarity on this issue had you chosen not to personally respond.
Re your specific account: your votes are downweighted. We do that when an account has upvoted too many stories or comments that break the site guidelines—particularly the sensational-indignant type of post, which is by far the biggest problem on HN and therefore the thing we try to dampen and downweight in every way we know how. If you want to commit to upvoting fewer such comments and/or stories, we'd be happy to take that penalty off your account. Other than that your account isn't penalized.
Re transparency in general: that's a complex question. We take the following approach: we don't publish a log of every moderation decision; we do answer specific questions when people have them. I'm not saying that's a perfect solution (it isn't, and we have ideas for making it better), but this is a super hard problem to get right. It's popular to argue "everything should all be completely transparent all the time" but having been at this job for a decade now I'm extremely wary of the unintended consequences that would have. I'll try to dig up some old links about that in case you or anyone cares. Edit: ok, there's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30141232 and a bunch more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27307075. If anyone reads those and has a question on this that I haven't already answered, I'd be happy to know what it is.
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I've always been surprised when HN took moderation actions against my account, so it's hard for me to commit to not abusing when I don't have a clear mental compass about what is what. I just conduct myself in a way which aspires for personal authenticity in discussion.
I feel sad that the sum of my behavior on this forum is considered problematic and requires penalizing.
Re the penalty: I don't want you to be sad so I have removed it from your account. It's kind of hard to get into the details because we don't discuss specific vote data.
We moderate HN threads less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the topic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). but 'less' does not mean we don't moderate at all. Until now we've moderated your comments much less than we would if you had been behaving this way about any other topic, but enough is enough.
Standard HN moderation practice, when users do this kind of thing, is to penalize and rate-limit their account. I'm going to do that now. (Edit: I changed my mind later. See the explanation below.) Since the reaction this will educe is predictable, I might as well answer it now: no, this has nothing to do with criticizing YC or YC startups. It's because you've been posting a plethora of low-quality off-topic comments and otherwise breaking the site guidelines. This is standard HN moderation and the only thing different in your case is how long we held off doing it.
Actually, IIRC, you're rather a good commenter apart from this, so if you want to fix this, it shouldn't be hard.
Edit:
For some reason I realized later that I didn't feel good about penalizing your account. It's not that what I said about standard moderation practice was wrong or anything—I just have a feeling that you're a good HN user coming from a good place and that there's probably a much better way to fix this. So I'm going to go with that instinct, and have removed the rate-limit etc.