However, there has been a glut lately of stories using HN as customer-support-of-last-resort or generic-complaints-about-$company, and we've been hearing an increasing amount of community complaints and pushback about those. HN's standard mod practice is to downweight most such threads, because they're repetitive [1] and don't contain significant new information [2]. (That's not to say they aren't significant and important to the person in the given situation—of course they are—but that's not the same thing.)
When the story is about a YC-funded startup, these principles conflict. We recently decided to start downweighting them more, though, in the hope of addressing the community pushback about this. I've been posting about this recently in the context of Stripe threads, but the same points apply here too:
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=34282052
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=34190090
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=33745192
The upshot is that we're adjusting a bit to downweight this class of posts more in general because that's what the community reaction is telling us; and that means downweighting the YC-related posts in this class more as well (although still not as much as the non-YC-related posts).
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...