This has been asked about a lot over the years and our position is that it would just generate endless more meta-discussion with people arguing about whether flags/downvotes were valid, fair, etc. We don’t want to encourage that.

What we do instead is pay attention to the sentiment (including public comments in threads) of the community, with particular emphasis on the users who make the most positive contributions to the site over the long term, and anyone else who is showing they want to use HN for its intended purpose. And we do a lot of explaining of our decisions and actions, and we read and respond to people’s questions in the threads and via email.

There are ways for us to be transparent without allowing the site to get bogged down in meta-arguments.