I think you underestimate the number of flags from users and overestimate the amount of direct moderator intervention.
There have been countless times where I've been the flag that tips a comment or a post over into the dead (or for posts, deranked) territory. I flag comments that are rude, abusive, or deliberately filled with misinformation. I flag posts that are likely to start flame wars, that are highly off topic, or that are clearly low-effort blogspam marketing with no valuable content.
If any of that sounds subjective to you, that's because it is. Most of the favoritism and bias you observe can be attributed to users like me who have an idea of what the HN culture should be and subjectively flag things that don't fit.
I imagine also, that plenty of HN readers use “flag” as a mega-downvote, for articles they don’t like or are offended by or whatever. Since there is no downvote for articles (only for comments), the “flag” is the only way for readers to try to bury one.
It’s the other way around, I think. We probably underestimate the amount of direct moderator intervention, both for stories and comments. It’s their full time job.
Ask yourself: what do you think Dan’s team does all day, every day, if not make decisions that influence the site? His comments are all that are publicly visible, so most people assume he just writes comments — an assumption as far from the truth as can be. And most people have no idea that there are even other members of the team, let alone know what they do.
This is by design. HN works best when people are focused on the content, not the site. It’s one of the most influential newspapers in the world, precisely because it focuses on the content. And you’d be kidding yourself if you feel they don’t decide which stories should stay on the front page, every day, a dozen times. Again, it’s their whole job.
Note that them seeing a story and allowing it to stay is also a choice, even though it’s implicit. So them doing nothing because they chose to let a story stay is not the same thing as them doing nothing because the community chose to put it there. Frankly, you wouldn’t want to visit HN if it was community run, because the community is terrible about choosing which stories should be on the front page. This has been proven true for over a decade, and the main reason Dan doesn’t come out and say so is because it’s one of those things that shouldn’t be said out loud. There’s no reason to call attention to how utterly awful the majority of users’ decisions are about what should be on the front page.
Remember, millions of people visit the site now. You wouldn’t want that many people to try to decide. The voting system is an indicator to the mods of potential community interest, but it’s ultimately up to the editors what stays and what goes.
People call this favoritism or censorship or other frankly silly terms, but there’s nothing sinister about it. The way onto the front page is simple: make something that someone bookish would find interesting or surprising. The "surprising" criteria is the trickiest part, because it covers what most people mean by "newsworthy" (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39778999). But HN has a particular kind of newsworthiness that filters out the majority of stories that the majority of users want to put on the front page.
It’s a tricky subject, and it’s long past time someone should write an essay to explain it all. I’m not quite sure how to do that without angering the community xor mods, but it would be interesting if it were possible. One reason this idea appeals to me is because I’d like to at least thank all of the dozens of people who help run HN behind the scenes; they rarely get any kind of recognition, because they don’t need it, let alone want it. But that makes them worth thanking all the more.
I recognise the huge amounts of effort involved in this and I applaud the moderators for keeping HN an interesting place to be.
That said, I think it's reasonable for us to have visibility on their manual interventions, and this could be easily surfaced via the Hacker News API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API), if the Story JSON included the values of "contro," "bury," and "gag" fields, which are currently opaque to users of the API
One other positive thing to mention about HN: the cost of running HN is non-zero, yet it remains ad-free. I'm grateful for this. So many websites have become unusable due to monetisation dark patterns.
This sort of system just encourages more meta debates about what is and isn't on the front page and why. Most of them are repetitive and boring. This is analogous to the 'receipts for downvotes' perennial - if you think about what it would mean in practice, it's not hard to see the result would be a crappier site.
That doesn't fix the boringness problem and people have meta-discussions about HN on other forums all the time so there's that for those who are into that sort of thing.
What makes you believe Dan has a team? And what do you mean by "team"? My presumption is that there are a number of unpaid volunteers who have been delegated small pieces of the moderation effort, but that there are no employees except Dan. Am I wrong?
Personally, I'd feel better about the future of the site if I thought there was a strong moderation team making numerous decisions behind the scenes. Instead, I think most stays/goes content decisions are made by one vastly overworked Dan and by a bunch of flagging users who frequently have ulterior motives.
There have been countless times where I've been the flag that tips a comment or a post over into the dead (or for posts, deranked) territory. I flag comments that are rude, abusive, or deliberately filled with misinformation. I flag posts that are likely to start flame wars, that are highly off topic, or that are clearly low-effort blogspam marketing with no valuable content.
If any of that sounds subjective to you, that's because it is. Most of the favoritism and bias you observe can be attributed to users like me who have an idea of what the HN culture should be and subjectively flag things that don't fit.