The front page would be filled with little else if they did not.
The censorship appears to extend even to adjacent news, like CA municipalities adjusting liquor regulations, et c. The story about a letter from the CA governor to the president was censored, as well.
Set up a script to diff the front page every 5 mins to see what I mean.
Their site, their rules. It still sucks, though. :(
Examples:
By contrast, the story where the CA governor issued a stay-at-home order got plenty of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633798.
There's room to disagree on which particular stories ought to clear the bar, but I hope the principles are at least clear in my explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22644521.
Perhaps you might want to publish a log of the things you aggressively downmod (contrary to the votes they receive) for being offtopic in the interest of curiosity/transparency? Maybe something like /leaders, a URL that isn't linked to from the frontpage? It would clear up confusion like this Ask HN.
I think there's value in links that get a lot of support, and it seems a shame to throw them away totally, even if they don't belong on the frontpage. I'd certainly peruse the stuff on such a list. Unlike /newest, it'd be mostly high-quality stuff, as otherwise it wouldn't have trended high/needed downmodding in the first place.
Most users don't care that much—I know that because if they did, we'd never hear the end of it—and those who do tend to be the litigious type who raise two new objections for every answer you give them. To play that game is to agree to a DoS attack on yourself. It sucks up limited resources that should be going into making the site better for everyone: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
That said, we're 100% in favor of satisfying users' curiosity about how HN is operated and moderated. We just do it ad hoc, by answering specific questions, rather than building meta facilities. From my perspective the issue isn't secrecy, it's efficiency. If meta facilities would actually be more efficient, that would be a great reason to build them. I would love it if software could alleviate more of our load. Unfortunately, I fear that they would have the opposite effect. The founder of a well-known forum that is older than HN once told me that introducing a meta section was the worst mistake they had made and that we would be crazy to do that.