It's not a question of painful - I'm happy to "admit" what's true, as best I can, and not what's not true. Let's see if we can sort that out a bit in the present case.

HN is certainly curated - I've been "admitting" that since the day I got outed as a mod here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621 (March 2014)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507229 (April 2014)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962942 (June 2014)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569117 (Nov 2014)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15556105 (Oct 2017)

But we try hard to do the curation by principle, not by personal whim. What principles? Really there's just one: intellectual curiosity—we try to feature what enhances that and dampen what degrades it [1]. From that starting point, though, you can derive lots of other principles. Probably the most important is that snark and indignation are bad for HN (especially in combination!) because they drown out curious conversation. That's all that you need to see why I posted that reply to the GP; no personal preference required.

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

The current case still seems very heavy on personal preference. Principles application is subjective as we are all human. I found the comment as interesting as the quote it is answering.

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