No doubt a thankless job, but your claims to being unbiased are obviously going to be faced with skepticism when you label industry critique as "predictable" or "mean" and censor it. It's your perception that it fills every thread, but my perception is that the industry cheerleading in this community is wildly untethered. I think you probably wouldn't deny that your goal is to stem generalized negativity, based on the bias that negativity is bad and positivity is good "for discussion." It's not as if that bias has no consequence.
If you were being consistent about this, by the way, you'd be censoring the banal security and bug sanctimony that dominates every thread on that topic. A buffer overrun? Good heavens! An unsalted pw hash? Fetch my inhaler!
It's not possible to be consistent because it's physically not possible to read everything, or even close.
I'm sure you're right that there are tropes of reaction in particular areas that deserve to get moderated by the same principles (of avoiding repetition etc.) and I don't doubt that you see some of them more clearly than I do. If you want to help with that, you could let us know when you see them, particularly when they're sitting at the top of a thread, choking out more interesting discussion. Downweighting those is probably the single biggest thing we can do to help discussion quality.
I wouldn't use the word "negative" - that covers way too many things. We're not trying to exclude negativity. We're trying to prevent certain common forms of it from dominating. I don't think it's so hard to understand why—this place would cease to be interesting if they did dominate. Thoughtful critique is always welcome, and we don't label that "predictable" because it isn't.
Re "industry cheerleading in this community is wildly untethered" - such perceptions are conditioned by the passions of the perceiver. If you had opposite passions, you'd have opposite perceptions. The data set has more than enough data points to satisfy all of these. That is by far the most consistent phenomenon I've observed on HN; nothing else comes close.
Sometimes a thoughtful critique can be obvious and widely held, as I think it was here. Endeavoring to belabor a simple argument or feign a unique thought process has little intrinsic value. Sometimes a spade is a spade, and that should be OK -- if indeed the goal is to be intellectually honest. But perhaps the goal is to steer the good fortunes of the tech industry and venture capitalists and the investor class, and that certainly would not surprise me greatly on an internet forum run by a venture capital firm.
If you were being consistent about this, by the way, you'd be censoring the banal security and bug sanctimony that dominates every thread on that topic. A buffer overrun? Good heavens! An unsalted pw hash? Fetch my inhaler!