He gave an answer when he was under no obligation to do so.
Anybody that is monitoring the effect of their submissions and is asking what went wrong is asking about potentially dangerous information. HN is a pretty fine balancing act, it would not take much to wreck it and the secret sauce serves us all well.
None of us are under any obligation to give a response or answer a question put to us on this site, but the fact of the matter is that we choose to.
The key point I've taken away from this is that everyone says that the websites monitoring software is secret and details can't be given, etc. but in this case it is people who are not privy to this knowledge in the same way that PG is.
Simply put, he saw the post, he responded, yet other people have had to give the tangible and useful responses when it could have easily been subverted by PG spending a little more time to explain his comment.
If he had the time to come on HN, look at the graph presented to him, come to a conclusion and comment upon it, he must have understood much more than he gave away and an expansion upon his first statement would have been useful, for instance: "Your submission set off the voting ring detector, it believed that ... and this caused it to trigger and lower your submissions ranking on the site." would have been an order of magnitude more effective. Even if it was only one short paragraph, it would have been better.
What strikes me as rude and presumptuous is when people complain about the HN site. There is no HN Pro with a support package. We're not paying to take part in this community. It reminds me of all the stories of freemium products where the free version users are more demanding than the paying customers.
Well, this is really promotional site for Y Combinator, in the same way as Joel's blog was a promotional blog for his company (Fog Creek). So by this token we (users of the site) serve a double function - consumers and producers of content and marketing audience, i.e. we are paying for use of the site by being marketing targets.
I should state that I wasn't complaining about the website, merely about a single persons comment - the fact that it happened to be PG is largely irrelevant to my complaint, it could have been about anyone.
Although, I believe this was covered further down the discussion but don't have time left this morning to find the link, I will try to locate it once I'm off the bus.
Anybody that is monitoring the effect of their submissions and is asking what went wrong is asking about potentially dangerous information. HN is a pretty fine balancing act, it would not take much to wreck it and the secret sauce serves us all well.