No this is a misinterpretation or perhaps I thought the meaning was implied. The spirit of what I meant is that of course you would say something like: "HN only downweights things in the interest of the community but never in the interest of YC."
>You've done it again with "Seems reasonable to say, don't trust news about YC on HN", implying that we somehow intervene to distort that, when the truth is that we do exactly the opposite—as I'd just explained in the comment you were replying, as well as on many previous occasions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
It is reasonable. It's called conflict of interest and it's encoded into the way we interpret action, motive and intention. Should we just drop everything and completely trust China when they say they say COVID wasn't a lab leak? Should we just blindly trust you when you say you don't censor the news at all when there's really no way of knowing?
Look I'm not saying you censor the news. I'm saying if you did censor the news or you didn't censor the news what you're saying here would be the exact same thing. Both the person who censors the news and the person who doesn't censor anything will say "I don't censor information." This is completely normal and expected because of the conflict of interest. This is what I mean by "Of course." My statement still stands.
There is really no way of knowing otherwise. Just because there are instances of negative news not being censored doesn't mean that nothing is censored. You can let tons and tons of negative topics through and you can also censor tons and tons of topics at the same time. Who knows? It's a common strategy to let some negative stuff through the filter just to make a news source seem like it's fair and balanced when the most insidious stuff gets burned.
You really can't prove anything here because of the conflict of interest. It is reasonable to say that you can't trust news about YC from HN just like you can't trust news about China from the Communist Party. Conflict of interest.
It's normal. Don't be offended because pretty much every organization or person is likely this. Who goes around spreading negative info about themselves?