zlacker

Another negative story about a YC company which has risen to the front page of HN and then seems to be getting a lot of pressure to get ranked down. It has more points and is fresher then a handful of other stories on the frontpage but ranks lower and is falling quickly. And when mentioned in the past, the reason often is the invisible anti-flamewar or similar features. What is it this time?

Elon needs to buy HN and open source the algorithm! /s

>>eis+(OP)
> anti-flamewar

This is a story about a company 1) in the crypto space, that 2) lost all of it's users money, and 3) used misleading disclaimers (and potentially trying to change them after the fact)

It has already devolved in multiple threads to discussion about what is-and-is-not technically a ponzi scheme (vs other forms of scams/fraud).

This whole thing is a recipe for a giant flame war.

>>nrmitc+C
To be fair, do you really expect a community as nerdy as this not to engage in pedantry about semantics? I would anticipate that in every discussion, inflammatory or not (I might even participate).

>>eis+(OP)
Wow, you're absolutely right. This story about how HN invested in an obvious Ponzi scheme (seriously, if the name Stablegains doesn't throw off alarm bells, you deserve to lose your money) fell over 10 spaces in the time it took me to click to the comments, read your comment, and click back to check.

>>Cederf+y4
Kind of beside the point, because pedantry about semantics with respect to "what kind of scam/fraud/etc was it that lost $42M of user's funds" leads directly to flamewar-style threads, which is what can reasonable cause a story to be deranked due to and anti-flamewar filter.

>>eis+(OP)
ime mods here tend to actually stay away from negative yc stories, in order to not get into slippery paths. don’t have proof of it, but the simple fact that this is still up with 400 points is a fact.

>>nrmitc+C
I do enjoy that much of the thread is down to arguing semantics and terms over what kind of scam it is. soon we'll be arguing over if the P is capitalized or not. https://xkcd.com/915/

>>eis+(OP)
I'm pretty sure stories get naturally downranked (even if they have a lot of points) as the number of comments begins to approach the number of upvotes. I think the idea is "anything with more comments than upvotes is probably a flame war". It may not be the best way to rank stuff, but HN is explicitly not a democracy.

>>frob+y8
I don't know what due-diligence that YC do but I can imagine, as someone who only knows the basics of crypto-currency, of being sucked into some confident founder telling me that, "of course it is safe, it uses stable coins".

The risks seem really obvious after everything falls through but there are plenty of other companies that are "obvious scams" who happen to have made it by luck/skill/investment.

>>lbrine+um
If you're so naive you could be sucked into stable coins that easily, you have no business running an investment fund.

>>lbrine+um
> The risks seem really obvious after everything falls through

The risks are obvious the second you see that they offer 15% yield, which is roughly DOUBLE the current yield of the average junk bond, and about QUADRUPLE the yield at the time YC closed.

>>eis+(OP)
Came here to say just this, this ranks higher than anything on the front page currently and is not very old. Usually HN algorithm allows a slow fall for high vote posts like this. This one’s quick descent right off the top 100 seems human-made.

>>eis+(OP)
No moderator touched this post. Moreover, it spent 10 hours on the front page.

Your comment makes me think you might be under a misimpression of how HN moderation works, so here's a refresher.

We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story. That doesn't mean we don't moderate at all (though in the case of this particular thread, we literally did not moderate it at all—any perception that made it seem that we did was completely mistaken). This is literally the #1 rule of HN moderation. It's the first thing that PG drilled into me when he trained me to do this job years ago. I hadn't even had a chance to grab a chair yet.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The reason we have this rule is that the good will of the community is literally the only value HN has, and that is not worth risking.