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Comment by pak | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate your candor on this, but I'm curious if you are implying two things: 1) you think that people interested in reading about Airbnb are behaving irrationally, and 2) people rarely get angry at YC companies?

I find the interaction between HN and YCombinator rather fascinating, because you obviously have a financial interest in many things posted on the site, but you also clearly feel some responsibility to play the neutral host. I wonder this responsibility comes from HN's value to YC as a barometer of trending ideas (requiring you to retain the faith of your userbase), or from some higher sense of "journalistic" obligations.

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Not to put words in Paul's mouth, but I believe his statement was:

1. It's relatively rare to get an angry mob

2. It's even more rare for that angry mob to target YC companies because YC companies are a small % of total companies

3. Therefore this situation is not common enough to optimize for

None of your points rule out my first implication, and I don't believe the logic for your second point was part of Paul's statement. Despite YC companies being a small part of the world economy (or whatever), they are disproportionately mentioned on HN for obvious reasons.

> 1) you think that people interested in reading about Airbnb are behaving irrationally

Every angry mob is irrational, even if there is a perfectly rational reason for their anger.

While concern about what has happened, is happening, should be happening (in various peoples opinions), and so forth is definitely rational as is an interest in watching it all play out (even if you don't care for airbnb at all specifically, this could possibly have implications elsewhere too).

People posting the same thing that others have already posted (or something so similar it makes no difference) and other people voting everything up whether it is a duplicate or not is irrational. It bends the system here potentially making the site less useful/interesting to others, it isn't going to change the situation, and the confusion of partial discussions spread over threads is going to put people off that might have otherwise cared about the situation (they'll stop reading any post about it, no matter how high up pages 1 it is, as they'll start to assume it is the same as last time).

lt;dr: the interest/concern is not irrational but some of the behaviour seeming steming from that is, so suggesting some people are behaving irrationally is not incorrect (IMO).

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