I'm also a YC founder of a (smaller, but top ~100 in terms of valuation) YC company. I don't know what your experience was like with Stripe, but the notion that Patrick has some unduly amount of power to exercise over HN and YC immediately flags to me as untrue. I've been on the receiving end of a lot of HN criticism, and I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.
Edits on your posts, recommending the best times of day to submit, explaining how HN algorithms work broadly, are accessible to everyone; these are discussed frequently on HN, and were all accessible to me even before I was a YC founder. I'm also certain the HN team wouldn't need to email Patrick about something like this being on the front page; when my company (~150 employees) is on the front page I get a bunch of messages about it from all sorts of different angles; certainly many of the thousands of Stripe employees use HN and would be capable of sending a Slack or text.
To me it seems the notion that Patrick has "indirect control" over parts of HN is a longer way of saying he has respect. I think Patrick may be the most universally respected founder in Silicon Valley, and perhaps doubly so amongst engineers. I am not surprised at all that people upvote his comments, as he's both the person speaking from authority, and they're usually well reasoned - I use them as a model for how to respond well (something I have not always done).
I'm not saying you're being untrue about your experience (and I don't think OP was being untrue about theirs), but the notion that Patrick as at the helm of an evil empire stealing from companies and manipulating folks to keep it quiet just feels farcically different from reality across the dozens of Stripe and YC/HN touch points I have.
> I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.
Consider [1] which was flagged dead. It was ~10 years ago, so I could be wrong, but I believe there was a follow-up meta "Ask HN" where someone asked why it was flagged (I can't find it), and I __believe__ PG said something along the lines that he didn't find the original constructive, hence flagging it dead. Top comment on the non-constructive OP was from spolsky with some insightful information on job postings...
Definitely seemed like going above and beyond to tip the scale in YC founder's favor.
Edit: found the followup/meta [2] (I was wrong, no official explanation was given, sorry about that).
Edits on your posts, recommending the best times of day to submit, explaining how HN algorithms work broadly, are accessible to everyone; these are discussed frequently on HN, and were all accessible to me even before I was a YC founder. I'm also certain the HN team wouldn't need to email Patrick about something like this being on the front page; when my company (~150 employees) is on the front page I get a bunch of messages about it from all sorts of different angles; certainly many of the thousands of Stripe employees use HN and would be capable of sending a Slack or text.
To me it seems the notion that Patrick has "indirect control" over parts of HN is a longer way of saying he has respect. I think Patrick may be the most universally respected founder in Silicon Valley, and perhaps doubly so amongst engineers. I am not surprised at all that people upvote his comments, as he's both the person speaking from authority, and they're usually well reasoned - I use them as a model for how to respond well (something I have not always done).
I'm not saying you're being untrue about your experience (and I don't think OP was being untrue about theirs), but the notion that Patrick as at the helm of an evil empire stealing from companies and manipulating folks to keep it quiet just feels farcically different from reality across the dozens of Stripe and YC/HN touch points I have.