I applaud your removal of all controversial Dropbox threads. It’s great to know I have a big brother looking out for me. By the way, could you also please remove any other content that I wish not to see, including YC startup scandals (airbnb, rapgenius, and now dropbox), racism, sexism, income inequality, NSA exploits, and depressed programmers in the top 10% income bracket.<p>Please just give me the standard topics of YC rhetoric, including “crappy YC startup looking to hire young, exploitable programmer”, “why you should quit school to join an accelerator”, and “why SV is clearly a meritocracy”.<p>This includes killing, reviving, and then pushing down the rankings of these specific threads which were on the front page, and now not even in the first 3 pages:<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7568302<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7568330
We didn't touch either of the posts you linked to—they were flagged to death by users. I actually unkilled them to respond.<p>As for controversial stories about YC startups, we bend over backwards <i>not</i> to apply the standard HN penalties to them and moderate them less, not more, than similar stories which aren't YC-related. That was the first thing PG told me about moderating HN and as well as the thing he emphasized most often. (Though I confess that today, I completely forgot that Dropbox was funded by YC.)
It's not censorship when a large percentage of the members of a community express that they aren't interested in a particular conversation, and don't think it's appropriate for the community in question.