(I&#x27;m not a mod or admin, so I&#x27;m not sure about this stuff. Perhaps I&#x27;m wrong.)<p>1) Hacker News has a variety of methods for marking submissions or comments as dead.  Not all of these require moderator intervention.  Many submissions are marked dead by spam filters. Or they&#x27;re killed by user flags. Some comments are caught in spam filters, or the user has been caught in a hellban.  Or sometimes users flag the comment (I think this is marked differently as &quot;flagged&quot; rather than &quot;dead&quot;).<p>2) Users with a small amount of karma can &quot;Vouch&quot; for dead items.  This will bring them back to live status, and might trigger the mods to look to see if the account was mistakenly killed.<p>3) Even if the account was correctly hellbanned users could vote to un-kill individual comments.  Although abuse of the vouch feature leads to loss of the button.<p>4) Can you point to anything that you think was incorrectly killed?  Plenty of stuff which is critical of HN or YCombinator or YCombinator companies is posted and not killed.  Mods have said, many times, that they do not intervene in killing those threads.<p>5) YCombinator companies are held to the same community standards as everyone else.  A YCombinator company that used sock-puppets to vote up their submissions would get banned.<p>6) Sharing your own things is fine.  There&#x27;s even a section of the site dedicated to sharing your stuff: Show HN.  And the rules ask people to engage in constructive criticism, and avoid undue negativity.  It&#x27;s a problem if the only thing you submit is from your own site.  But it&#x27;s a problem if a user only submits from one site even if it&#x27;s not their stuff.  Some people take every opportunity to mention their stuff in comments. &quot;Oh hey, just wanted to say my site EXAMPLE.COM does this, try it out, let me know what you think&quot;.  Sometimes that&#x27;s okay if it&#x27;s directly relevant to the parent comment.  And HN is seems to be reasonably tolerant of it.  But you have to be honest (&quot;This is my site&quot; is okay, &quot;hey, have you seen this site?&quot; is less okay) and you have to not over do it.<p>But, like I say, I&#x27;m just a user so maybe I&#x27;ve got this all wrong.