Make it public?
The upside is that it is easier to see who is gaming the system. Or that could be another downside if the answer is "the moderators".
> Or that could be another downside if the answer is "the moderators".
To me it seems like an upside if we know when moderators are gaming the system.
But you're right, there are some forms of security that don't require obscurity. For voting systems though, I would categorize them as "cat and mouse" systems, which unfortunately fall into the obscurity category.
Someone finally has enough data to confront your obvious bias and enough people saw it that you had to back up and apologize but this is a rare exception.
Mods removed submissions and individual posts they find distasteful and it has nothing to do with HN guidelines, they are applied unequally just as some members get special treatment. hN is just not that honest of a place to have an open discussion on a variety of topics.
no administration leads to 4chan like boards and newsfeeds
/b/ is the best known and least moderated board of 4chan; only child pornography and brony stuff is removed.
Edit: I took a look at your list and don't see any pattern in those stories. Some belong on HN and indeed got a lot of time on the front page. Others clearly don't belong on HN. In a few cases moderators intervened to penalize the story or turn penalties off, but in a solid majority moderators didn't intervene at all. In a few cases a bunch of points were dropped by the anti-voting ring software so the 'real' score wasn't as high as it seemed.
To me all this shows, and the reason I described it as 'completely wrong', is that you can't reconstruct what's going on from timestamps, point totals, and story rank. There's simply too much data that isn't public. I know that's frustrating to the large section of HN's userbase who love to know what's going on and figure things out. But I don't believe making it all public would be helpful, so here's the balance we've arrived at over the years: we make public the the principles of how the system works, including moderator intervention, and we answer specific questions about specific cases.