I am just gonna link the stats of this hackernews post[0] and let public decide the rest because for context, this is same company which was mentioned in a blow-up post 12 days ago which had gotten 600 upvotes and they didn't respond back then[1] (I have found it hard for posts to have such a 2x factor within minutes of posting, that's just my personal observation. Usually one gets it after an hour or two or three.)

I was curious so I did some more research within the company to find more shady stuff going on like intentionally buying new domains a month prior to send that spam to not have the mail reputation of their website down. You can read my comment here[2]

Just to be on the safe side here, @dang (yes pinging doesn't work but still), can you give us some average stats of who are the people who upvoted this and an internal investigation if botting was done. I can be wrong about it and I don't ever mean to harm any company but I can't in good faith understand this. Some stats

Some stats I would want are: Average Karma/Words written/Date of the accounts who upvoted this post. I'd also like to know what the conclusion of internal investigation (might be) if one takes place.

[There is a bit of conflicts of interest with this being a YC product but I think that I trust hackernews moderator and dang to do what's right yeah]

I am just skeptical, that's all, and this is my opinion. I just want to provide some historical context into this company and I hope that I am not extrapolating too much.

It's just really strange to me, that's all.

[0]: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47326101 (see the expected upvotes vs real upvotes and the context of this app and negative reception and everything combined)

[1]: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47163885

[2]:https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47165788

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dang 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The upvotes on the current post are fine - the reason you saw the submission rise in rank is that startup launch posts by YC startups get special placement on the front page (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Not every such post does, but some do.

In other words, your perception wasn't wrong, but the interpretation was off. I've put "Launch HN" and "YC W26" back in the title to make that clearer - I edited them out earlier, which was my mistake.

As for the booster comments, those are pretty common on launch threads and often pretty innocent - most people who aren't active HN users have no idea that it's against the rules. We do our best to communicate about that, but it's not a cardinal sin—there are far worse offenses.

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john_strinlai 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

hi dang. while you are here -- are comments artificially ordered on this post?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326953 is grey (i.e <=0 karma). my top-level comment is at 14 karma. we posted within 15 minutes of each other. their comment is higher up the page. ive never seen something like that before.

the two posts calling out unethical behavior have been living at the bottom of this post the entire time, until a couple of actually [flagged] comments ended up under them.

i do not care about the karma itself, at all. but i do care to know if launch/show posts have comment sections with cherry-picked ordering or organic ordering.

edit 2: i am at 19 points, and now below two grey (<=0 karma) comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326455). whats up dang?

edit 3 (~1 hour later): you've responded to a handful of other comments and ignored this one as it becomes more and more evident that someone has artificially ordered the comments to ensure that critical comments are at the bottom of the page. it has shattered my perception of show/launch posts to know that you manually curate the comments to form a specific narrative. i really (naively) thought you guys were much more neutral about that sort of thing.

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dang 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> you've responded to a handful of other comments and ignored this one

I hadn't seen this until 30 seconds ago. The assumption of moderator omniscience leads to a lot of mistaken conclusions!

Sure, we marked the offtopic comments offtopic, which lowers them on the page. This is standard HN moderation. If we didn't do this, then nearly every thread would be choked with something offtopic at the top.

At the same time, we haven't killed the posts or put them in a "stub for offtopicness" [1] like we otherwise would. They're still here for people who want to read them, while at the same time the main discussion can be about the main topic, which is the startup launch.

HN is actively moderated and always has been. Downweighting offtopic/generic comments is one of the biggest things we've ever discovered for improving the quality of the threads. For us it's about the quality of the site as a whole, not specific narratives, but of course everyone can (and will) make up their own mind about this. What I can tell you is (a) the way we do these things has been stable for a long time (HN time is measured in decades, not years), and (b) we're always willing to answer questions about it.

Oh, and (3) - when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story, then we moderate less than we otherwise would [2]. We do still moderate, though—we just do it less.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

	▲	john_strinlai 33 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		im sorry, but i disagree quite strongly with your suggestion that a comment about the unethical behavior of a company is off-topic on a post by that company launching their product. especially when that company wants you to curl \| bash their code onto your machine -- potential users deserve to know that despite being a YC-backed company (which would typically be a positive indicator, people may reduce their scrutiny) that they have been caught scraping data they shouldnt be, and then using that data for marketing, and refuse to respond to anyone who bring it up. but it is your world and i am just living in it, so i will carry on. i appreciate that you did not collapse them.
	▲	Imustaskforhelp 14 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Dang, Although I really appreciate the work you put in. I am not quite sure if the criticism of said company because of genuine reasons and suspicions about it in launch HN of said company is offtopic. As John said, I agree with him on the aspect that the definition of offtopic might vary for us then it seems. But if I may ask, doesn't the policy of moderate less not more your (3) point opposite to what you said about offtopic from how I perceive it? > Sure, we marked the offtopic comments offtopic, which lowers them on the page. This is standard HN moderation. If we didn't do this, then nearly every thread would be choked with something offtopic at the top. >Oh, and (3) - when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story, then we moderate less than we otherwise would [2]. We do still moderate, though—we just do it less. I would suggest that the minor disagreements that we have is because these two points seem contradictory to me from how I perceive it. I would suggest (if possible) to moderate less as you mention not more and let the order of ranking be natural which in this case might be that john's comments can come at the first place for example. Because you are moderating it by putting it into downweighting it and that's one of the concerns that we sort of have. > At the same time, we haven't killed the posts or put them in a "stub for offtopicness" [1] like we otherwise would. They're still here for people who want to read them, while at the same time the main discussion can be about the main topic, which is the startup launch. Also regarding this. I might have to trust ya when you say this but I do feel like its within the HN spirit that when a company gets launched, the critisims of the company and its past gets talked about. On top of my head I remember some VPN company sometime ago which used TEE encryption by intel. One of the first comments or similar was about how the guy had shady past because they were the former server owner of liberachat and some controversy surrounding it and how they wouldn't want to run said VPN (other comments were about the trust within Intel in general) My point is that this might be considered offtopic according to ya now but those were active and quite on top. So maybe I am recollecting events differently but it does seem to have some idea that this doesn't seem offtopic (atleast to me, I could be wrong though, I usually am but still) With all of this in mind, I don't think that its necessarily offtopic Sir. I'd really appreciate it if for better accuracy you can have the flow of comments be natural in this regards in this particular thread as We'd really appreciate it if possible. Thanks! Thoughts?

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Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Adding onto it, My comments are also ranked low. This comment on which dang replied has 4 upvotes which I think that this is at the 4th last of this post and the other comment that I made on your comment where I responded to ya has 3 upvotes.

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Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks dang but can you please explain there being two accounts who wrote something very small comment and one account being completely new and the other being 7 months old only being invoked in this case.

Clearly I am not the only one here as john_strinlai here seems to have had somewhat of the same conclusion as me.

Dang I know you care about this community so can you please talk more what you think about this in particular as well.

I understand that YC companies get preferential treatment, Fine by me. But this feels something larger to me

I have written everything that I could find in this thread from the same post being shown here 3 days ago in anywhere.ai link to now changing to github to skirt off HN rule that same link can't be posted in short period of time and everything.

This feels somewhat intentional just like the spam issue, I hope you understand what I mean.

(If you also feel suspicious, Can you then do a basic analysis/investigiation with all of these suspicious points in mind and everything please as well and upload the results in an anonymous way if possible?)

I wish you to have a nice day and waiting for your thoughts on all of this.

	▲	dang 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm happy to answer as best I can! but I'm having trouble understanding what you're specifically asking. If https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327129 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328465 don't answer your questions, can you maybe try picking the most important question and making it as specific as you can? Then I can take a crack at that and we can go from there.