Log-based accountability (on the blockchain!) is an interesting idea; unfortunately HN suffers from the same problem as some open source projects where it's a high-profile thing that some people get tons of value from yet it doesn't generate any money to spend on cool new features.
In principle I believe that internal criticism and governance are good things, but you absolutely have to separate it into a separate /meta/ section (which HN doesn't have and mods don't intend to ever add) so it doesn't overwhelm the rest of the site and even then it seems to always get flooded with crackpots and (more recently) culture warring.
I agree that threads about mass surveillance, Snowden, Assange etc are pretty low-quality but I think it's very difficult to discuss those topics in general. How do you discuss actual conspiracies without opening the door to misleading conspiracy theories? There's no one I would trust, including myself, to moderate or set rules for such a discussion.
America put the lady who ran a torture center and deleted evidence meant for Congress in charge of the mass surveillance revealed by Assange and Snowden.
If that's off topic, then Assange and Snowden ought have been too. As you say, who could we trust to moderate or set rules for discussions like that. At the moment, we are supposedly trusting dang, and I don't. And I can't say that here because it's "off-topic / meta"... Because dang said so.
The logic is circular.
And while solutions could exist (you mention blockchain logs), and HN is supposedly the community for those very people who would be able to create / understand those solutions (techy hacker entrepeneurs), talking about those solutions :here: is off topic. Is that not a glaring double standard?
Assange and Snowden have too many ardent fanboys for their stories to get flagged off the front page but Haspel (I actually had to look up the name to figure out why I was supposed to care about this individual.) doesn't. Mystery solved; case closed.
I would have thought that a community of so called tech hackers and entepreneurs could demand some form of logs to know that censorship :really: isn't a problem.
> If you want to criticize HN, I suggest that you do it outside of HN.
That's truly awful advice. Disallowing criticism is step 1 of bad shit happening. At a minimum it stifles any possible improvement. And it's :always: step 1 of fascism.