The problem with that is that they have various tools like adjusting things off the frontpage or banning comment threads to the bottom of the list; but the UI itself does not provide information on those. If the mods do any of these things but don't also leave a human comment on them, then it's unlikely people will notice.

>the UI itself does not provide information on those //

Which is down to the varying desires of the community and the administration. The admin/mods have at least in part a goal of promoting their commercial ends whilst the community in general are neutral wrt those same ends. If the mods upgrade YC companies visibly and downgrade competitors, for example, then the chances are that will cause problems between the admin and the community.

Based on that I can't see YC ever agreeing to do their moderation in public. I think we have to remember that this is not a neutral forum but has an inbuilt bias, through moderation, towards the administrations benefits.

A user can see those things by turning on "Show Dead" in their profile.

I have show dead on since a long time. The things i mentioned have no UI to note them. Show dead only makes, well, "dead" posts render their text.

There's also the |contact| link to ask the moderators directly about anything that looks nefarious.

I think the perspective some people are taking here is that if it's invisible in the UI, then how would they ever know to ask? Short of running a continuous scraper and then compiling statistics as article did.

I'd be all for tagging a generic "Downvoted by moderation" onto any article this happened to. The poster will probably still be annoyed, but I imagine most would agree with moderation most of the time. And if they like, they can contact.

What they're less likely to agree with is this happening invisibly. And if it's invisible, then how do we know whether we (as a community) agree with it or not?

PS: Side note, strongly against "toggle a non-default option" as a solution. Filter bubbles are incompatible with democracy and true, diverse community.

I agree that running a continuous scraper and compiling statistics sounds like a hack.