Crisis of trust in Altman reflects back on Y Combinator. They have significant financial motivation to downplay his behavior regardless of any moderators claims.

Oh, I meant false claims about HN moderation, like the GP comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40711123 ("The mods suppress anything that makes YC or anything they invest in look bad"). That wasn't just completely made up, it's the exact opposite of the truth.

My comment originally included that explicitly, but I was trying to edit it down a bit and thought this would be clear from the context. Since it wasn't, I've added an edit there now.

> it's the exact opposite of the truth.

One can hardly call it the exact opposite of the truth if the feared downweighting of this post actually happened.

It's commendable that it was corrected and that you are attempting to be transparent. But, it sure creates the appearance of a self-protective attempt to moderate.

Yes, I take your point and would have preferred the original downweight to be less for that reason. (Edit: I checked with the mod and originally it was - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40720026. It looks like user flags made the difference.)

Different mods inevitably make different calls sometimes, though. That doesn't change the fundamental practice, which has been stable for a long time (long before I took over HN long ago).

One thing I often point out in these situations is that "moderate less" (which is what the rule calls for) is not the same thing as "not moderating at all". Most probably the mod in this case was thinking along the lines of "I'm still moderating less in this case than we normally would, but I'll check with dang just in case".

You called the story “flimsy.” How so?