TPB was hosted by PRQ which in turn was hosted by port80. But the two companies had a quite incestuous relationship with each other. The owners of the two companies were friends or at least good acquaintances with each other.
I would be more fair to address the broader point of the post rather than just one sentence. It's good that the moderator(s) specify why something is penalized[0], but it doesn't really change the overall result.
Stories about hot social and political controversies reliably attract both a lot of upvotes and a lot of user flags. This, together with how the software interprets votes and flags, explains the effects the OP is describing.
On hot social and political issues, many people find it irresistible to conclude that HN is biased against the side they favor and favors the side they oppose. They perceive this bias in all things HN: the community, the software, the mods, etc. But the truth, as far as I can tell, is that on most of these issues the community is divided. That's why the threads on them turn into flamewars.
Users reliably flag threads that turn into flamewars on HN. (By "flamewar" I mean angry arguments over predictable positions.) Moderators do so as well, though not to the same degree. But this isn't a bias against social issues per se, let alone particular social issues—the same pattern holds on threads about, say, basic income, or high-frequency trading, or even something like static vs. dynamic typing in programming. It's a matter of how divided the community is and how strongly people feel. It's more noticeable on any issue where one feels strongly.
What I do think it makes sense to call the bias of the site is a bias against the low-signal/noise discussions that inevitably result when people angrily disagree, especially when they do so through the filter of a pre-existing ideological battle. This is biased in the sense that HN's guidelines are biased: they call for certain types of stories and discussions rather than others.
Sometimes people argue that HN should abandon its anti-flamewar bias, because after all these are important issues and they need to be debated. But this fails to consider systemic effects on the site. The more ragefires burn, the more thoughtful users leave. That selective process, repelling the users HN most wants and attracting those attracted to flames, is a vicious circle that (a) is hard to get out of and (b) would turn the site into scorched earth. For all HN's flaws, it would be nihilistic to just let it burn.
That doesn't mean we aren't open to ways of balancing these things better: they're hard to balance, and if we're missing something we want to know.
> Users reliably flag threads that turn into flamewars on HN.
Then why not simply disable comments on sensitive stories?
> But this isn't a bias against social issues per se, let alone particular social issues—the same pattern holds on threads about, say, basic income, or high-frequency trading, or even something like static vs. dynamic typing in programming. It's a matter of how divided the community is and how strongly people feel. It's far more noticeable, of course, on any issue where one personally feels strongly.
Sure, but of all of your examples, only social issues are really important. It doesn't matter what people's intentions are (this is something that we seem to always get back to). If the result is that really important stories -- stories that touch on the very core of technology, start up culture and innovation -- get "silenced" (and, as a result, cause observes to view HN's community in a negative light) then it's your duty to make sure that this doesn't happen.
> But this fails to consider the systemic effects such a change would have on the site. The more the ragefires burn, the more thoughtful users leave.
So disable comments on those stories.
> But this fails to consider the systemic effects such a change would have on the site.
Except that there's an opposite systemic effect: HN readers get the sense that being thoughtful means shying away from those issues (but not from vapid stories about some startup raising money). Also, thoughtful users might abandon because anything that's truly interesting (other than, say, objective discoveries) -- and therefore controversial -- is not featured on HN. Your policy appeals to those attracted to the vanities of SV culture (and then YC people write blogs trying to educate people against them) while repelling those who are interested in reading criticism of it.
Not saying something sometimes sends as clear a message as saying it.
Disabling comments on sensitive stories has the effect of privileging the viewpoints of people who happen to win the front-page contest, and endorsing whatever framing happens to accompany whatever happens to be the most popular telling of that story. That seems like an extremely unfortunate dynamic to adopt.
Please, HN, do not allow people to post stories on the site that can't be contextualized or even rebutted in comment threads. Lots of popular stories are really, really bad.
I actually think this would encourage more thoughtful rebuttals in the form of long blog posts. One great thing about this community is that usually there are enough people to promote stories on opposite sides of the debate to the front page.
The assumption here is that blog post followups to popular front-page stories will themselves naturally find the top of the front page. But of course they won't. For one thing: simple causality guarantees that they won't be available until hours or (depending on the quality of the post) days after the original story first hits the front page, when it's at the zenith of its gravitational pull for HN votes.
You may want to consider writing a blog.ycombinator.com post about this. I think there are lots of HNers who would find these algorithms interesting :)
