Again I don't disagree. I acknowledge the very likely truth in the claims. I get why it pisses people off. I'm a founder, I want distribution as much as the next person and being bootstrapped I know it's less likely for me than for someone who sold 20% of their company to someone with connections. Those facts just doesn't disqualify PH as a source of interesting things to look at for me. For clarity though I've spend a grand total of like 4 hours on PH in my life[0], I just don't have that much time to waste.

HN has super voters. There's also a trait that your account can be tagged with which makes content that you share less likely to get to the front page (all votes on your content count as some percentage of a "real" vote). That attribute is usually added to non-insiders whose content often makes it to the front page.

I don't think they do it out of malice. They are design decisions in service of amplifying/dampening some desirable/undesirable effect. It doesn't make the creators evil, it just means that they have goals, metrics or influences other than the purity of their voting mechanisms. Community sites are super fucking hard and the people who have built successful ones have my respect.

0. https://twitter.com/wewals/status/798759401892941826