Comment by jfoster
12 years ago
It's unusual how intolerant of experimentation entrepreneurs can be.
This may or may not work. PG even acknowledges that it's likely to go wrong initially. Implicit in that is that they will work on fixing it until it's working better than the current system. In the end, it's guaranteed to either completely fail as an experiment (they'd probably roll it all back) or yield something working better. Yet there's so much angst about the changes here.
It's not always irrational to get concerned about changes. For example, laws are typically written and then there are substantial barriers to revisiting them. In the case of a website, though, why worry? If this isn't working better, it's extremely unlikely that YC would leave it in that state.
This whole proposal is intolerant of experimentation; it's censorship-by-default of community members whose attempts to contribute aren't guaranteed to be viewed and endorsed by the top 5% of users within a short time frame.
It's entirely rational for entrepreneurs to oppose something which appears to be a dreadful idea, and especially to oppose initial implemention of it on a grand scale (a proposal to experiment with pre-moderating only brand-new users, low average karma users or threads which are flagged up as possible flamewars would, I suspect, be considerably less unpopular as the solution might actually be less harmful than the problem. Edit: looks like this now is the proposal.).