Well, I personal found a lot of value in that "Google 2FA" post. If it had been downweighted and I never saw it, that would, IMO, be a bad thing.
On the issue at hand, I run a software company. A very old one. I'm pretty forgiving about issues with support, etc. What I've been through with Coinbase has really been shocking and I thought the community should know.
Although these situations are rightly important to the people experiencing them, such posts are not of general intellectual interest. Mostly they use HN as a sort of desperate trampoline to attract attention from somebody-anybody inside inscrutable $company. Or perhaps the desperation has already metastasized into rage.
These feelings are understandable and we all share them (hence the popularity of these submissions). I've got a couple stories of losing $BigCo accounts myself, which boil my blood whenever I think of them. But we're trying to optimize for exactly one thing on HN: curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and this isn't it. In fact it's the opposite.
Such threads invariably turn into a generic referendum on $company, and eventually a generic dumping ground for ever-expanding indignation. Generic/indignant threads are the opposite of intellectually curious conversation, so this is important.
The goal is to keep HN for its intended purpose: curious conversation on intellectually interesting topics. For this, we have no choice but to treat the YC-related customer-complaint posts similarly to the others, because a glut of complaints about Stripe, Airbnb, or Coinbase isn't any more on topic than the equivalent material about Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.
Normally I wouldn't comment about this, but when the company is YC-funded, our principle is to moderate less (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), so there's a tradeoff here. Without an explanation, people understandably have perceptions like https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=34320001, even though we don't moderate HN that way.
Other recent explanations on this:
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=34320816
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=34282052
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=34190090
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=33745192
Edit: Btw, it's the same with Tell HN: It is impossible to disable Google 2FA using backup codes - https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=34441697 - although I downweighted the Coinbase thread quite a bit less, in keeping with the principle of moderating less when a YC startup is the story.