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.
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
See https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news-ranking... for more discussion on terminology
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.