Why was the title of this post changed long after posting to something that doesn't match the article title? This editorializing goes directly against HN Guidelines (but was presumably done by the HN team?)
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Even more concerning is that, by editorializing the title of an article that is (in part) about how Nvidia uses their market dominance to pressure reviewers and control the narrative, we must question whether or not the mod team is complicit in this effort.
Is team green afraid that a title like "NVIDIA is full of shit" on the front page of HN is bad for their image or stock price? Was HN pressured to change the name?
Sometimes, editorialization is just a dumb and lazy mistake. But editorializing something like this is a lot more concerning. And it's made worse by the fact that the title was changed by the mods.
There are many reasons why the editorialized-title rule exists. One of the most important reasons is so that we can trust HN as an unbiased news aggregator. Given the content of the article, this particular instance of editorialization is pretty egregious and trust breaking.
And to be clear, those questions I asked are not outlandish to ask, even if we do trust HN enough to dismiss them.
The title should not have been changed.
the attempt to steer direction is well hidden, but it is very much there
with https://hnrankings.info/ you can see the correction applied, in real time
the hidden bits applied to dissenting accounts? far less visible
The concentration of wealth and influence gives entities like Nvidia the structural power to pressure smaller players in the economic system. That’s not speculative -- it’s common sense, and it's supported by antitrust cases. Firms like Nvidia are incentivized to abuse their market power to protect their reputation and, ultimately, their dominance. Moreover, such entities can minimize legal and economic consequences in the rare instances that there are any.
So what exactly is the risk created by the moderation team allowing criticism of YC or YC companies? There aren’t many alternatives -- please fill me in if I'm missing something. In contrast, allowing sustained or high-profile criticism of giants like Nvidia could, even if unlikely, carry unpredictable risks.
So were you playing devil’s advocate, or do you genuinely think OP’s concern is more conspiratorial than it is a plausible worry about the chilling effect created by concentration of immense wealth?
I think that if you want to understand why it might be helpful to change the title, consider how well "NVIDIA is full of shit" follows the HN comment guidelines.
I don't imagine you will agree with the title change no matter what, but I believe that's essentially the rationale. Note that the topic wasn't flagged, which if suppression of the author's ideas or protection of Nvidia were goals would have been more effective.
(FWIW I have plenty of issues with HN but how titles are handled isn't one of them.)
But, in my opinion, the public expectations in my opinion are clearly exaggerated and sometimes even dangerous as we ran the risk of throwing the baby with the bathwater when some ideas/marketing/vc people ideas become not realizable in the concrete world.
Why, having this outlook, I should be banned of using the very useful word/concept of "hype"?
https://blog.sebin-nyshkim.net/posts/nvidia-is-full-of-shit/...
Meanwhile the AI companies continue to produce new SotA models yearly, sometimes quarterly, meaning the evidence that you're just completely wrong never stops increasing.
Also, it's somewhat easy to tell who is a bot. Really new accounts are colored green. I'm sure there's also long-running bots, and I'm not sure how you would find those.
On this topic, I'm curious what others think of the renaming of this post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44435732
The original title I gave was: "Paul Graham: without billionaires, there will be no startups."
As it was a tweet, I was trying to summarize his conclusive point in the first part of the sentence:
Few of them realize it, but people who say "I don’t think that we should have billionaires" are also saying "I don't think there should be startups,"
Now, this part of the sentence to me was the far more interesting part because it was a much bolder claim than the second part of the sentence:
because successful startups inevitably produce billionaires.
This second part seems like a pretty obvious observation and is a completely uninteresting observation by itself.
The claim that successful startups have produced billonaires therefore successful startups require billionaires is a far more contentious and interesting claim.
The mods removed "paul graham" from the title and switched the title to the uninteresting second part of the sentence, turning it into a completely banal and pointless title: Successful startups produce billionaires. Thereby removing any hint of the bold claim being made by the founder of one of the most succesful VCs of the 21st century. And incidentally, also the creator of this website.
I can only conclude someone is loathe to moderate a thread about whether billionaires are neccessary for sucessful startups to exist.
ps. There is no explicit guideline for tweets as far as I can tell. You are forced to use an incomplete quote or are forced to summarize the tweet im some fashion.
This is a single prediction of a problem that will occur. The tools not living up to the hype leads to disappointment, and people are likely to entirely abandon it because they got burned (throw the baby out with the bath water), even though the tools are still useful if you ignore the hype.