Dang, Although I really appreciate the work you put in. I am not quite sure if the criticism of said company because of genuine reasons and suspicions about it in launch HN of said company is offtopic. As John said, I agree with him on the aspect that the definition of offtopic might vary for us then it seems.

But if I may ask, doesn't the policy of moderate less not more your (3) point opposite to what you said about offtopic from how I perceive it?

> Sure, we marked the offtopic comments offtopic, which lowers them on the page. This is standard HN moderation. If we didn't do this, then nearly every thread would be choked with something offtopic at the top.

>Oh, and (3) - when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story, then we moderate less than we otherwise would [2]. We do still moderate, though—we just do it less.

I would suggest that the minor disagreements that we have is because these two points seem contradictory to me from how I perceive it. I would suggest (if possible) to moderate less as you mention not more and let the order of ranking be natural which in this case might be that john's comments can come at the first place for example. Because you are moderating it by putting it into downweighting it and that's one of the concerns that we sort of have.

> At the same time, we haven't killed the posts or put them in a "stub for offtopicness" [1] like we otherwise would. They're still here for people who want to read them, while at the same time the main discussion can be about the main topic, which is the startup launch.

Also regarding this. I might have to trust ya when you say this but I do feel like its within the HN spirit that when a company gets launched, the critisims of the company and its past gets talked about.

On top of my head I remember some VPN company sometime ago which used TEE encryption by intel. One of the first comments or similar was about how the guy had shady past because they were the former server owner of liberachat and some controversy surrounding it and how they wouldn't want to run said VPN (other comments were about the trust within Intel in general)

My point is that this might be considered offtopic according to ya now but those were active and quite on top. So maybe I am recollecting events differently but it does seem to have some idea that this doesn't seem offtopic (atleast to me, I could be wrong though, I usually am but still)

With all of this in mind, I don't think that its necessarily offtopic Sir. I'd really appreciate it if for better accuracy you can have the flow of comments be natural in this regards in this particular thread as We'd really appreciate it if possible. Thanks!

Thoughts?