The principles that we apply to this kind of thing are clear, but they conflict with each other in this case because Stripe is a YC-funded startup. Basically, these two:
- We downweight overly repetitive topics and follow-up posts [1] because repetition goes against the mandate of the site [2]
- For major ongoing topics, keep the stories that contain significant new information and downweight the rest [3]
conflict with this one:
- We moderate less when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story [4]
The latter takes precedence, so for years we've downweighted these posts much less when the story is connected to YC. However, they've been proliferating, and when complaints like https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=34189858 and https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=33744053 start showing up in numbers, that's a community immune response that we have to take care of. So we've recently started downweighting.
(Of course none of this is a comment on the OP's situation, which I'm sure is distressing and stressful.)
Edit: I got an email with a question that I should clarify. The "major ongoing topic" here is really the "customer support of last resort" category of post in general. It's not Stripe-specific—there are tons of these, like this one from a few days ago: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=34116361. The trouble is that they're repetitive and usually not intellectually interesting (not to discount how important these situations are to the people caught in them). For this reason and because of the repetitive quality (see [2]), we often downweight these. It's just that when the YC angle gets entwingled into this, there's a constraint on how much we can downweight. That's the aspect I was talking about above.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...