Regarding the "silent" down-weighting, unless I've misunderstood, I think that's a very bad idea. I think all moderation activity should be transparent to the users of the community.
> we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or its startups are involved
I think it's great that you have this as an explicit policy! Thanks for all your work moderating this community.
Aside: I found the Airbnb post interesting because I recently saw a map showing a massive rise in the number of apartments for rent as home owners move off Airbnb. I'm in the market for a new rental, and I totally didn't see this surge in supply and consequent price-drop coming. So this topic is interesting to me. But, more generally, the particularly "harsh" externalities of the pandemic on specific tech markets/startups is interesting to me, and I saw this Airbnb post as another data point to add to my mental models of how pandemics like this affect various markets. I think the fact that it got 15 points in 30 minutes is evidence that some non-trivial subset of other HN users felt this way too. In any case, transparent moderation would probably help the community to inform you of accidental bad moderation choices (not to say you should always go with the crowd's decisions, of course).
It's a reasonable thing to think, and a lot of people do, but the worry is that a full moderation log would lead to reams more meta-discussion and litigation, which would amount to a DoS attack on the limited resources we have. That is, resources which ought to go into making the site better for everyone would get squandered answering objections from the litigious sort of users who make two new objections for every answer you give them. That would be a catastrophic outcome, not only because of the DoS aspect, not only because those users are a tiny minority, but because of what it would do to moderator morale, which is precarious to begin with and could easily tip into burnout.
That doesn't mean we don't care about transparency—we do! We always answer users' questions. We just do it on an ad hoc basis rather than with a bureaucratic system.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I emailed The Information to ask if they'd unlock it for HN readers, like they've done in the past [4]. They were nice enough to do so. I changed the HN link to the unlocked URL, posted about it in the thread [5], and unburied the submission.
In the future, can you please follow the site guidelines [6], which ask you to email us questions like this instead of posting submissions about them? There's nearly always a simple explanation. But if you post about it on HN, the thread will fill up with complex (often sinister) speculation that doesn't inform anybody, is off-topic, and takes time to properly reply to. Also, we often have no idea that the post exists. I only found out about this one because someone emailed to ask if we were planning to reply.
By the way: that article, though a good piece of reporting, is not a good HN submission. The fact that a company is making cutbacks is not an "interesting new phenomenon" right now [6], it's a dog-bites-man story. Since there's nothing intellectually interesting, the thread is guaranteed to be just another generic discussion [7] about Airbnb and/or the covid crisis. Normally, we'd downweight such an article off the front page, because when there is a flood of stories about a major ongoing topic (like this crisis), we prioritize the ones with significant new information [8]. But if we applied normal moderation in this case, people would accuse us of burying the story because it is about Airbnb. So a different rule takes precedence: we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or its startups are involved [9]. That's why we left the thread on the front page. Doing that makes HN less interesting, but the integrity of the site is more important, and this is one way we try to protect it.
If, after reading all this, anyone has a question I haven't answered, let me know and I'll be happy to address it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708065
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[7] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527396
[9] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...