It's not like that now. The elves have left middle earth.
HN's greatest contributors of the past, have been gone for years. Worse still, the site's audience has broadened greatly and its content has shifted towards the very mainstream news topics that it once avoided. Moderators have clear political axes to grind. While the site initially shunned submissions related to politics (and even codified this in its guidelines), it's no longer uncommon for flags to be turned off explicitly political stories that lead to viscous flame wars.
HN is invaluable, as a reminder in the fragility of communities and of the impermanence of anything we create. If a project that some of the smartest people on the planet put their heart and soul into can fall apart so ruinously, who are we to have any ego about our creations?
1. Mainstream news stories were more common on HN in past years (actually a lot more common); 2. moderators don't moderate HN to suit their own politics (in fact we take great care not to); 3. we don't block anyone for making a comment about YC (that's in response to your user profile, since I can't reply there).
2. I've seen it happen countless times. With the exception of pg himself, who displayed an allergy to politics or anything that got in his way of attempting to discover truth, I believe every HN moderator his sit firmly on the same side of the political spectrum and culture wars.
Being humans, most have a propensity to ignore inflammatory or factually incorrect comments they agree with while flagging those they don't as "generic" or flamewar inducing. I noted dozens of examples of this behavior but the ROI on going through them is almost certainly poor or negative. The moderation response related to major controversies of the past 2 years has been clear. Which pages were artificially weighted was very poorly correlated with the intellectual honesty of their contents.
3. I was indeed prevented immediately upon making the comment in my profile, and met with a message that I was commenting too quickly. Even after waiting a full hour, I was still blocked from commenting.
Interestingly another story recently asked about YC's GDPR compliance and was weighted so heavily that it sank below much older stories with fewer upvotes. Comments didn't outnumber votes, ether.
#3 is actually related to #2 as YCs deepening economic and political investment in an authoritarian state increases the likelihood of a future HN where comments challenging certain militaristic, ethno-nationalist propaganda will be flagged as "generic political arguments" while repeating the propaganda itself is allowed.
My view of YC's ethics is not so poor that I think this is an immediate risk, but money does tend to bend politics over time. In the early days, few expected Yahoo would one day assist in uncovering rights activists so they could be executed, and yet they did.
Re "I've seen it happen countless times": since you don't know anything about our politics, what you're seeing is your own interpretation of whatever stood out to you, which is likely whatever you most disliked. I know it feels convincing, but people convince themselves of everything this way, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546533 to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307091. It is called the Hostile Media Effect (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), and there are countless examples on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....
Re your account, it looks like we rate limited it because it has a history of using HN primarily for political (and especially national) battle, which is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That's routine HN moderation. Saying something about YC was not the active ingredient; people do that all the time without getting moderated. Indeed we have a rule against moderating HN for that reason: see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....
Re the YC/GDPR thing: it's impossible to say much without a specific link but I can tell you we didn't downweight it because of YC—that would break the rule I just mentioned. Users were complaining about a flurry of GDPR posts in recent weeks and even posting lists of recent discussions, so if we touched it at all it was probably dupe-related.