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They aren't ranked differently and YC alumni votes don't affect ranking any more than other upvotes. Most importantly, the first principle of HN moderation is that we moderate less, not more, when a YC startup (or YC itself) is involved in a story. That does not mean we don't moderate at all—but we moderate significantly less. I've written about this many times:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I'm in the process of traveling somewhere but I'll try to come back to this thread soon and respond to the more specific claims in the OP. None of the claims in there that I personally have direct knowledge about (at least the ones I've had time to see so far) are true, and I agree with you that forthcomingness would be helpful.
> Stripe and YC effectively co-run the most important media asset in Silicon Valley: Hacker News.
A few of my articles [1] have made the front page so I can weigh in on this a (tiny) bit.
> The readers know: any time Stripe comes out with a new product, it’s #1 on the site
I do believe that "the mods" have the ability to boost articles at their discretion so I would not be surprised if YC companies frequently get a boost. This is a separate admin feature from the open role posts that YC companies post (which cannot be commented on and which drop from page #1 over a fixed timeframe I think). I will have to dig for the source on that but I believe dang has publicly commented on it here. That does indeed feel somewhat shady IMO.
But on the other hand, if you have a huge name like Stripe (or Chrome DevTools) it really isn't as hard to make it to page #1 as the Bolt person is making it out to be. The hardest part IMO is crafting a title that succinctly summarizes how new feature X is a big deal.
> Getting a #1 ranking is INCREDIBLY difficult and generates millions of views.
Millions of views sounds like a stretch. 250K to 1M sounds more accurate to me.
[1] I wrote the Chrome DevTools docs for 3 years. DevTools docs made the front page probably 10-15 times. I also was content lead for https://web.dev for a couple years. Those docs made the front page another 10-15 times. I've also had 2 or 3 personal articles make page #1.