Let's call low-effort comments what they are and make the conversations a little simpler.
That said, it's easy to be critical and hard to be constructive. I still come to HN regularly so there's obviously something to it. I'm not pretending to have the magic bullet to these problems (some of which I believe are fundamental/intractable).
EDIT: I find it ironic this post has fallen off the first page of HN before I finished this comment, despite having many comments and being something I find interesting.
That being said, this is a forum for VC and startup talk among other things, so it would be pretty surprising if there wasn't some astroturfing at play. Self-promotion comes with the territory. The mods are doing their best but to some extent it's in the game.
Finally, there's no irony about this no longer being on the front page. When I first clicked into this thread, I was surprised it was FP still, because it had twice as many comments as votes and that usually trips the flamewar detector. I think folks are generally unaware of the systems that make HN tick, and that can make the experience pretty confusing.
Sure there is. It's an interesting conversation to me and it's being pushed away from the front page. I didn't say it was foul play, I said it was ironic. The algorithms are so fearful of controversy they push away interesting topics.
Also, I've emailed the mods many times before. My experiences have been mixed.
That's just one of the tradeoffs. HN optimizes for curiosity, which does sometimes mean using blunt automated tools to fend off negative subjects.
Fundamentally, I think over-meta-commenting on the state of HN is considered boring here (at least by the mods), since it's been covered so many times before.