They're definitely supposed to adhere to the same standard as actual moderators, and from what I've seen, they do. I was reviewing every decision quite closely for a while, but eventually stopped because it was too repetitive- it was always basically 'yup, that's ok'. A few exceptions but there's always variance - calls differ among actual moderators too.

The intention is to try to inch in the direction of a more self-regulating community while improving the quality of the discussions. Improved discussion quality is by far the most important thing and as far as I can tell this experiment is a big success in that department, so the essence of the HN is definitely not being diluted by it. If it were, we'd stop it immediately.

Not sure if that helps or not!

Edit: if anyone wants to see a typical example, here's a top subthread that one of the users we're talking about correctly marked as offtopic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31231858. That's the kind of pointless flamewar stuff that tends to get stuck at the top of a page. Downweighting it makes everything better, and having more eyeballs out there to catch it sooner is super helpful. That's the intention behind this experiment.