Comment by dang

> However, the reasoning for that is that we want the HN community to decide on what's interesting and gets on the front page.

Exactly the same reasoning applied to deciding what's interesting and gets funded. I'm surprised this is even a question. If we had changed that rule, HN users would have skinned us alive.

Saying that "interviewing and evaluating will be done in regular HN threads" meant that the regular HN thread rules applied. We did change one of those—from "be civil" to "be nice", which by the way people did a pretty good job of—and I explained that change at length in the original post.

If you read through the comments in that original thread you'll see that a lot of them had to do with people's concerns about gaming of the voting system, which is one of the most common things that comes up here, and my answers were all about reassuring them that we'd watch for it and disqualify applications if we found it.