Comment by hkphooey

This perhaps marks the beginning of the end for HackerNews.

Who wants to contribute to a "community" where there is active censorship of posts critical of YCombinator companies (see Dr Chrono), or you get hell-banned for no good reason, and now this poorly thought-out "rule"?

CPerciva pointed out an obvious flaw. Another is this: if you had to start a brand new HackerNews tomorrow, would you implement the rule? Of course not, because nobody would have any karma points to begin with, so they wouldn't be able to approve or see pending comments, meaning no comments would ever get posted! Duh!

Now you could argue that the HackerNews moderators and owners have karma points and they could approve comments to seed the system... but then why not just have a private forum for all your start-up friends, invite only, so you can be sure they all speak right?!