> Also, it's sort of odd that it was directed to pg, considering pg has made exactly one comment on HN in the last year.
That's pretty much the point Zed was making, in an off-kilter way. Zed is all about real names, taking responsibility for things by putting your name on what you say, talking to people in real life to settle disputes because people aren't empathetic enough online, etc.
The abusive comments on HN need to be "blamed" on someone. Someone has to take responsibility for them. If there's no way to blame the commenters themselves, then the most obvious thing to do is to blame the person under whose aegis those comments receive the protection of anonymity. PG has the ultimate authority (or near-enough) to change HN such that anonymous untracable abuse is no longer possible through it. Thus, he's responsible for not having done so.
"Apparently you will allow links to be posted repeatedly even after they’ve been voted down if it’s “gratuitously negative” of me, but take anything about one of your shitty startups down immediately."
I didn't, but I'm presuming a specific mechanism to that, because HN really doesn't have that much moderation (just dang, as far as I know, and previously just pg very part-time.) This might be overly charitable, so correct me if you know more:
Probably these YC companies' founders—or, if they've gotten big enough, their social-media people—read HN. They see these things, and then, being wiser-than-most to how HN works, they report them directly to the HN email address.
From there, maybe dang has specific orders to do things YC company founders ask him to do, but I doubt it; probably any contact to the moderation staff asking for a "gratuitously negative" (and possibly slanderous) post about you personally to be taken down, would be taken seriously. It's just that you'd have to do such policing and reporting yourself, like the YC companies do.
What I don't expect, is that dang remembers every possible YC startup (or has some userscript highlight all mentions of their names for him or something), and then deletes posts if-and-only-if they're both "gratuitously negative" and about a YC company.
It's much simpler than that. We don't have any orders to do anything about YC companies, nor do they email us about negative posts (if they did, we'd tell them it's a public forum and there's not much we can do), nor do we delete posts. From my point of view it's a non-issue, though I understand why that's far from obvious.
"I didn't, but I'm presuming a specific mechanism to that, because HN really doesn't have that much moderation (just dang, as far as I know, and previously just pg very part-time.)"
This is not correct and has not been correct for the vast majority of HN's existence. There were a number of moderators in the early days, selected by pg, and there are a number of moderators now, presumably selected by dang. And, of course, everyone can contribute to moderating by flagging things that don't belong on HN.
Not sure what you mean by "no one doubts that it's happening", but we don't take down negative posts about YC startups. It's a perennial accusation, doubtless because it's so easy to make, but it's false. We try to be as careful as we can about this. I've written about it many times; a recent example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9635659.
That's pretty much the point Zed was making, in an off-kilter way. Zed is all about real names, taking responsibility for things by putting your name on what you say, talking to people in real life to settle disputes because people aren't empathetic enough online, etc.
The abusive comments on HN need to be "blamed" on someone. Someone has to take responsibility for them. If there's no way to blame the commenters themselves, then the most obvious thing to do is to blame the person under whose aegis those comments receive the protection of anonymity. PG has the ultimate authority (or near-enough) to change HN such that anonymous untracable abuse is no longer possible through it. Thus, he's responsible for not having done so.
...is, I guess, the logic.