So this post was original posted this morning, but after HN requested I repost it got to #1:
Source: I got one of these for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9083672 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9086223
Not as rarely as you think.
More on this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395389 and the links from there.
>> We use a combination of software filters and human review to find good-but-overlooked stories. "Good" here means by HN's definition of "gratifying intellectual curiosity".
Hopefully that answers your first point. Second, HN mods are hired to work full-time on improving and polishing HN. This requires that they be professional, and professionalism in this sense requires ignoring your personal views. Having any kind of motive not based on improving HN would be unprofessional.
This is a way in which HN is distinguished from Reddit: YC puts money into guaranteeing that HN works well. Only well-known people can be mods, not everyone on the Internet. These people have reputations for being "good," being fair and impartial.
Mods have something at stake (jobs, reputation). So does YC. They're not going to make a mistake.
And in my experience, (although I realize that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data") dang et al. have been nothing but totally neutral in every action (that I've seen, so far) on HN.
I think most of the inmates here would be surprised that they're not running the asylum :)
And at least HN is clear about where the moderators stand. Meritocracy doesn't function. Either you have reddit, where users circlejerk into oblivion in smaller communities because votes don't matter (and larger communities don't work either, because their bigger mod teams do things like [1,2,3]) or you have StackOverflow, where upvotes and downvotes are extremely powerful and either allow you a lot of power or allow you to zap others and keep them in line.
HN allows you to easily amass some karma so you can say something that isn't in line with others' opinions. Sometimes people will even upvote you and make your minority opinion prominent. Downvoting requires at least 500 karma, making sure you have the lay of the land down (and prevents spam accounts from taking down comments immediately).
HN has a lot of transparency. Try enabling "showdead" in your profile. Forget uneddit, that's built in on HN.
We're not inmates. We're here for the conversation. We like cool stuff and we like to talk about it.
[1]: https://archive.is/CFKgq [2]: https://i.imgur.com/EWVH9RW.jpg [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3hewwm/misc...
Just putting it like that (while also in election season) gives me an idea, though: a site where members must either give a vote to everything that has touched the front/new page within the last 24 hours, or nothing. (Maybe even having them sort the page to provide IRV rankings rather than a sign vector.) Way fewer people would bother, but as long as it was still a representative sampling...