If there's an actual blacklist where YC employees can just arbitrarily ban founders from working with certain companies that's quite surprising and maybe pretty bad for YC's reputation.
If you mean YC has a strong community of founders who share war stories of how people and companies were difficult to work with, and the other YC founders pay attention to those stories though, well, that's not a blacklist.
About the blacklist, I don’t know exactly how it works, who specifically has access to it or who can add entries to it, but I know it exists, I know people who have been affected by it, know people who have been told explicitly about it and know that at least some partners have access to it.
I have no idea what you're referring to, and if you're going to make such insinuations you should be specific and concrete. Otherwise it's impossible to answer, and that makes it a smear.
YC competitors go straight to shownew to minimize visibility and they have no hope of landing on the front-page. Whereas YC companies go straight to the front-page.
That's not even touching on the dirty tricks the YC network plays with the VC community. They will work hard to ensure that no YC competitors get funded, including spreading false dirt on founders of competitive companies.
/shownew and /show are clearly explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html ("Every Show HN appears on shownew. Once it clears a small points threshold, it will appear on the show page in the top bar.") and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ("All submissions appear on newest, and all Show HNs on shownew, but there is a small points threshold before a post appears on ask or show.")
The stuff you're saying about how YC works is not only made-up, it's the opposite of the truth. YC often funds competitors to existing YC startups—first because if you're funding 1000 startups a year, that's inevitable; and second because startups don't usually die because of competition, as PG and YC have been explaining to founders for many years. A startup that's building something people want will almost always find a way to differentiate itself.
We don't moderate Show HNs to favor YC startups or disfavor other startups. We do give YC startups the chance to post Launch HNs that get placed on HN's front page (as explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). But these don't go on the /show tab (they used to, but I disabled that so YC startups wouldn't get too much of an extra advantage). Plenty of Show HNs make the front page, and the overwhelming majority have no connection to YC—in fact, I can't fathom how you'd have thought otherwise, since this seems quite obvious.
When a non-YC startup is having a successful Show HN, I often help them and also encourage them to apply to YC. When a non-YC startup posts a Show HN that isn't successful, I often email them with suggestions about how to rework it so the community will like it better, and if they do that, I often put their Show HN in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it gets a random placement on HN's front page.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28810941 I gather that you're upset about something that happened to a specific Show HN. Rather than jumping to false conclusions about what happened, you should post the link so that (a) we can look into it and respond, and (b) readers can make up their minds for themselves. Since the comments you're posting contain no specific information, the more you post dramatic claims, the less likely readers are to believe you.
There could be a ton of reasons why your friend's Show HN got demoted, ranging from setting off the flamewar detector, the voting ring detector, getting flagged by users for some reason, getting downweighted because it broke the Show HN guidelines, getting downweighted because it broke the HN guidelines, various kinds of spam or abuse behavior (the worst of which is buying upvotes from spammers, which people unfortunately do but which typically causes their post to get buried immediately, and their account and site banned on HN). I'd need a link to say for sure which of those, if any, it was. Or maybe it just didn't get enough upvotes to clear the hurdle from /shownew to /show. That often happens. It happens to YC startups too.
If your friend(s) didn't do anything bad, you or they should email us so we can look at the post and possibly help. That's what people do when they assume good faith, and that approach has a much higher expected value than the approach you've been taking with these comments. You/they should do that out of simple self-interest if nothing else. Even when people did do something bad, we usually forgive and unban them if they take responsibility for it and promise not to do it again.
Not only do we not lie to the community, we try never to do anything that isn't clearly defensible to the community. To do otherwise would be not only wrong but stupid, since it would risk losing the good faith of HN users. Why would we do that? That's the only value HN has. It's precisely by not doing it that we can keep HN in the high esteem of this audience, and therefore keep YC in a kind of special relationship with users here. That's what makes HN valuable to YC (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
> There could be a ton of reasons why your friend's Show HN got demoted, ranging from setting off the flamewar detector, the voting ring detector, getting flagged by users for some reason, getting downweighted because it broke the Show HN guidelines, getting downweighted because it broke the HN guidelines, various kinds of spam or abuse behavior (the worst of which is buying upvotes from spammers, which people unfortunately do but which typically causes their post to get buried immediately, and their account and site banned on HN).
"We have half a dozen opaque excuses" isn't the argument you think it is. The fact is this site shouldn't even exist due to the crystal clear conflict of interest between running a vc firm and a startup "news" site. That's not just journalism 101, it's common sense 101. It's not defensible.
> Not only do we not lie to the community, we try never to do anything that isn't clearly defensible to the community.
If you take one step outside the HN/YC echo chamber, you'll find that most people know that this site is a scam and heavily weighted toward promoting YC companies as that's the only reason it exists. Only a very, very foolish person would believe otherwise.
Also LOL that you hid this reply! It's because there is no defense for a vc firm pretending to run a "news" service and you know it.
I didn't hide any of your posts - I've been unhiding them*. They are getting filtered by software. I've also been turning off the user flags that you've been attracting.
This has become repetitive, though, so I'm going to stop doing that now unless you have some specific information to offer.
* because we moderate HN less, not more, on YC-related topics [1]. Less doesn't mean zero, though.
You're lying. Next time you nuke one of my friends Show HNs off the front page, I'll send them a link to this comment so they can call you out publicly. YC partners don't hold grudges and work their network against people who have damaged their ego??? Bull fucking shit. I know YC companies call in hits all the time on people as they brag about it relentlessly. You have all kinds of levers to pull here and you pull them without hesitation. The YC network spreads false information about competitors all the time. They kill deals, focus companies against those they don't like and generally are one of the least ethical group of people operating in the tech space (and that's saying a lot). That you'll get on here and make an outright brazen lie saying that this doesn't happen is very par for the course.
None of this is true. I mean, I suppose there could be an invisible YC cabal acting completely out of character in ways the rest of us never observe, but that's so unlikely, it would be a Russell's teapot. I have never observed anything along those lines, and I've observed countless things going the other way.
I've also helped many (dozens if not hundreds by now) non-YC startups with their Show HNs, so the truth is actually the opposite of what you say. The goal is to have HN be the most interesting community it can be, because that's how HN serves YC's interests in the long run (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). The global optimization is worth more than the sum of any local ones. We try never to do things that aren't defensible to the community, because the good faith of the community is the only asset HN has. Risking that would be dumb.
You should really supply specific links if you're going to post accusations, so that readers can make up their minds for themselves. Otherwise the community here is going to compare the extremeness of your claims to their lack of any specific information, and discount them.
Not sure what will land you there, but I know they have it and use it.