Please don't post ranting accusations like this. We're accountable to this community every single day, as this case demonstrates. Any time we do anything that seems even a little bit suspect, we hear about it very quickly.

> a mod log will allow some sort of bad actors to do something vague and threatening

I don't know of any time we've said anything like that. Dang has explained plenty of times why we don't publish a moderation log [1]. Mostly it's because we don't want to promote meta-discussion, because the thing we want most here is for discussions to stay on-topic. There are plenty of ways for people to see what we're doing and hold us to account if we get things wrong.

> we are on a site run by a VC so what would you expect, of course they're going to tip the scales

HN is only any use to our bosses if we continue to be the place where the best (i.e., "smartest") hackers come to have the highest-quality discussions about the most important topics, and the best/smartest hackers have the best bullshit detectors, almost by definition. But even if we thought we should deprioritize that consideration and instead "tip the scales" in aid of the narrow commercial interests of our parent organization (leaving aside the flawed presumption that it would work), YC has zero interest in protecting the reputation or commercial interests of the megacorps, which it demonstrates through its actions continually [2,3].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-i...

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/22/y-combinator-says-apples-a...