I’ve always wanted to see on HN a public audit trail of all moderator modified, or removed posts and comments. That would give greater transparency and might prevent moderators enforcing their own beliefs and norms. Then again the counter argument, or point, is that HN won’t do that because it could open mods to greater pressure, unless it’s actually corporate policy to control the narrative.

Any other reasons why HN wouldn’t publish a public audit trail?

Without all the information you're still left with a lot of mystery. I might ban an account, for seemingly nothing, because I can see they've created 15 accounts in the last two days to troll and stir shit up. Partial information seems to create as many, if not more, conspiracies than no information.

Moderating large social systems is tricky.

I think any action done can be noted to that effect, but a step towards transparency should be a goal, because over time and interaction that “mystery” cold be solved. Wikipedia records all changes for review, with such an erudite crowd behind HN, it would seem trivial to establish such a system.

Flagging is the least bad system I’ve seen so far. HN can be configured to show flagged or dead posts as well so it doesn’t really compare.

Does the admin(s) need to do anything to hide a post when a post has been flagged by users or it is automatically hidden?

It's automatic. If enough users flag a post, it gets "killed" and will only show up (with the tag "[flagged][dead]") if you have the "showdead" option enabled in your profile.

It's automatically hidden.

I don't think it's an awful system but I don't think it's exactly right for HN - in normal operations it works fairly well but when combined with some less desirable HN stereotypes it can just involve shutting down discussion one disagrees with (e.g. merely mentioning Donald Trump by name was an insta flag during the election, but you could always get away with worse if you talked about democrats because the average user is further right than most forums)

I think most of us automatically downvote or flag anything political regardless of personal politics. Especially US presidential politics, because that's what the uninteresting parts of the internet are for.

It is completely false that a bias doesn't come into play with political content.

It is not necessarily a bad thing, but some users appear to have been given more power and can shut down those articles more quickly.

The least bad system is far more transparent.